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THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES 
OF HENRY AND ME 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



/ 

The Martial Adventures 
of Henry and Me 






BY 

WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE 

Author of "A Certain Rich Man," etc. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 

TONY SARG 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1918 

AXL rights reserved 



^v 



Copyright, 1918 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, April, 1918 



m 10 1^1^ 



©CI.A494533 



CONTENTS 

chapter page 

1 In Which We Begin Our Sentimental 

Journey i 

II In Which We Observe the " Rocket's 

Red Glare" 43 

III In Which We Encounter " Bombs 

Bursting In Air" 83 

IV Wherein We Find That " Our Flag Is 

Still There " 122 

V In Which We Discern Things "' By 

THE Dawn's Early Light "... 175 

VI Wherein We Become a Trio and Jour- 
ney TO Italy ' 226 

VII Wherein We Consider The Woman 

Proposition 267 

VIII In Which We Discover " A New Heaven 

AND A New Earth " 295 

IX In Which We Return to " The Land of 

the Free " 333 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Frontispiece 

And at that it seems a lot of money to pay for a 
rig which can be worn at most only two 
months 3 

" You'll have to put out that cigar, sir " . . . . 15 

She often paced the rounds of the deck between us 21 

" Col-o-nel, will you please carry my books ? " . 29 

So we waved back at them so long as they were in 

sight 41 

" Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty blame 

toot sweet about it ! " . . • 53 

Eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe 67 

One of our party climbed to the roof of the dugout 87 

" Come on ! Let's go to the abri ! " 109 

So we went back — me holding those khaki trous- 
ers up by sheer force of will and both hands! 119 

He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and was 

irritated for a second at his inconvenience . .127 

" Oh, yes," answered the Eager Soul to our en- 
quiring eyes. " Mrs. Chessman — this is prac- 
tically her hospital " 131 



^^ 



Illustrations 

PAGE 

He was a rare bird; this American going on a big 

drunk on water 149 

Henry puffed on his dreadnaught pipe and left the 

lady from Oklahoma City to me 155 

And he sat cross-legged 161 

As we sat in the car he came down the street 
beating a snare drum ........ 177 

They were standing on the running board all this 

time with the train going forty miles an hour 187 

" What part of the States do you Canadians come 

from ? " 203 

He told us what happened impersonally as one who 
is listening to another man's story in his own 
mouth 219 

A fat man can't wear the modern American army 

uniform without looking like a sack of meal . 229 

He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable vividness, 

a cutaway coat of glaring scarlet broadcloth 239 

We thought he might be testing us out as potential 
spies 261 

And we felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped 
from a tacky party and dropped into a grand 
ball 301 

" Well now, sir, you wouldn't be wearing those 
brown shoes to Lord Bryce's tea, would you, 
Mr. White?" 309 



THE MARTIAL ADVENTURES 
OF HENRY AND ME 

CHAPTER I 

IN WHICH WE BEGIN OUR SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY 

BY rights Henry, being the hero of this story, 
should be introduced in the first Hne. But 
really there isn't so much to say about Henry 

— Henry J. Allen for short, as we say in Kansas 

— Henry J. Allen, editor and owner of the Wich- 
ita Beacon. And to make the dramatis personse 
complete, we may consider me as the editor of 
the Emporia Gazette, and the two of us as short, 
fat, bald, middle-aged, inland Americans, from 
fresh water colleges in our youth and arrived at 
New York by way of an often devious, yet alto- 
gether happy route, leading through politics where 
it was rough going and unprofitable for years; 
through business where we still find it easy to 
sign, possible to float and hard to pay a ninety- 
day note, and through two country towns; one 



2 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

somewhat less than one hundred thousand popu- 
lation, and Emporia slightly above ten thousand. 

We are discovered in the prologue to the play 
in New York City wearing our new silk suits to 
give New York a treat on a hot August day. 
Not that we or any one else ever wears silk suits 
in any Wichita or Emporia ; silk suits are bought 
by Wichita people and Emporians all over the 
earth to paralyse the natives of the various New 
Yorks. 

In our pockets we hold commissions from the 
American Red Cross. These commissions are 
sending us to Europe as inspectors with a view to 
publicity later, one to speak for the Red Cross, the 
other to write for it in America. We have been 
told by the Red Cross authorities in Washington 
that we shall go immediately to the front in 
France and that it will be necessary to have the 
protective colouring of some kind of an army uni- 
form. The curtain rises on a store in 43rd Street 
in New York — perhaps the "Palace" or the 
"Hub" or the "Model" or the "Army and 
Navy," where a young man is trying to sell us a 
khaki coat, and shirt and trousers for $17.48. 
And at that it seems a lot of money to pay for a 
rig which can be worn at most only two months. 
But we compromise by making him throw in an- 




And at that it seems a lot of money to pay for a rig 
which can be worn at most only two months 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey 5 

other shirt and a service hat and we take the lot 
for $17.93 and go away holding in low esteem 
the " pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious 
war " as exemplified by these military duds. In 
our hearts as we go off at R. U. E. will be seen 
a hatred for uniforms as such, and particularly 
for phoney uniforms that mean nothing and cost 
$18.00 in particular. 

And then, with a quick curtain, the good ship 
Espagne, a French liner, is discovered in New 
York harbour the next day with Henry and me 
aboard her, trying to distinguish as she crawfishes 
out of the dock, the faces of our waving friends 
from the group upon the pier. 

The good ship Espagne is all steamed up and 
scooting through the night, with two or three 
hundred others of the cast of characters aboard; 
and there is Europe and the war in the cast of 
characters, and the Boche, and Fritzie and the 
Hun, that diabolic trinity of evil, and just back 
of the boat on the scenery of the first act, splat- 
tered like guinea freckles all over the American 
map for three thousand miles north, south, east 
and west, are a thousand replicas of Wichita 
and Emporia. So it really is not of arms and 
the man that this story is written, nor of Henry 
and me, and the war ; but it is the eternal Wichita 



6 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

and Emporia in the American heart that we shall 
celebrate hereinafter as we unfold our tale. Of 
course, that makes it provincial. And people 
living in New York or Boston, or Philadelphia 
(but not Chicago, for half of the people there have 
just come to town and the other half is just ready 
to leave town) may not understand this story. 
For in some respects New York is larger than 
Wichita and Emporia ; but not so much larger ; for 
mere numbers of population amount to little. 
There is always an angle of the particular from 
which one can see it as a part of the universal; 
and seen properly the finite is always infinite. 
And that brings us back naturally to Henry 
and me, looking out at the scurrying stars in 
the ocean as we hurried through the black night 
on the good ship Espagne. We had just folded 
away a fine Sunday dinner, a French Sunday 
dinner, beginning with onion soup which was 
strange; and as ominous of our journey into the 
Latin world as a blast of trumpets opening a 
Wagnerian overture. Indeed that onion soup 
was threaded through our whole trip like a motif. 
Our dinner that night ended in cheese and every- 
thing. It was our first meal aboard the boat. 
During two or three courses, we had consid- 
ered the value of food as a two-way commodity 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey 7 

— going down and coming up — but later in the 
dinner we ordered our food on its merits as a one- 
way luxury, with small thought as to its other 
uses. So we leaned against the rail in the night 
and thought large thoughts about Wichita and 
Emporia. 

Here we were, two middle-aged men, nearing 
fifty years, going out to a ruthless war without 
our wives. We had packed our own valises at 
the hotel that very morning in fear and trembling. 
We realized that probably we were leaving half 
our things in closets and drawers and were taking 
the wrong things with us, and checking the right 
things in our trunks at our hotels in New York. 
We had some discussion about our evening 
clothes, and on a toss-up had decided to take our 
tails and leave our dinner coats in the trunks. 
But we didn't know why we had abandoned our 
dinner coats. We had no accurate social knowl- 
edge of those things. Henry boasted that his 
wife had taught him a formula that would work 
in the matter of white or black ties with evening 
clothes. But it was all complicated with w^hite 
vests and black vests and sounded like a corn 
remedy; yet it was the only sartorial foundation 
we had. And there we were with land out of 
sight, without a light visible on the boat, standing 



8 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

in the black of night leaning over the rail, looking 
at the stars in the water, and wondering silently 
whether we had packed our best cuff buttons, 
" with which to harry our foes," or whether we 
might have to win the war in our $17.93 uniforms, 
and we both thought and admitted our shame, that 
our wives would think we had been extravagant 
in putting so much money into those uniforms. 
The admirable French dinner which we had just 
enveloped, seemed a thousand miles away. It 
was a sad moment and our thoughts turned nat- 
urally to home. 

"Fried chicken, don't you suppose?" sighed 
Henry. 

'^ And mashed potatoes, and lots of thick cream 
gravy ! " came from the gloom beside him. 

" And maybe lima beans," he speculated. 

" And a lettuce salad with thousand island 
dressing, I presume ! " came out of the darkness. 

" And apple dumpling — green apple dumpling 
with hard sauce," welled up from Henry's heavy 
heart. It was a critical moment. If it had kept 
on that way we would have got off the boat, and 
trudged back home through a sloppy ocean, and 
let the war take care of itself. Then Henry's 
genius rose. Henry is the world's greatest 
kidder. Give him six days' immunity in Ger- 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey g 

many, and let him speak in Berlin, Munich, Dres- 
den, Leipsic and Cologne and he would kid the 
divine right of kings out of Germany and the 
kaiser on to the Chautauqua circuit, reciting his 
wrongs and his reminiscences ! 

Henry, you may remember, delivered the 
Roosevelt valedictory at the Chicago Republican 
convention in 19 12, when he kidded the standpat 
crowd out of every Republican state in the union 
but two at the election. Possibly you don't like 
that word kid. But it's in the dictionary, and 
there's no other word to describe Henry's talent. 
He is always jamming the allegro into the adagio. 
And that night in the encircling gloom on the boat 
as we started on our martial adventures he began 
kidding the ocean. His idea was that he would 
get Wichita to vote bonds for one that would 
bring tide water to Main Street. He didn't want 
a big ocean — just a kind of an oceanette with a 
seating capacity of five thousand square miles was 
his idea, and when he had done with his phantasie, 
the doleful dumps that rose at the psychical aroma 
of the hypothetical fried chicken and mashed po- 
tatoes of our dream, had vanished. 

And so we fell to talking about our towns. It 
seems that we had each had the same experience. 
Henry declared that, from the day it was known 



lo Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

he was going to Europe for the Red Cross, the 
town had set him apart; he was somewhat Hke 
the doomed man in a hanging and people were 
always treating him with distinguished considera- 
tion. He had a notion that Henry Lassen, the 
town boomer, had the memorial services all 
worked out — who would sing " How Sleep the 
Brave," who would play Chopin's funeral march 
on the pipe organ, who would deliver the eulogy 
and just what leading advertiser they would send 
around to the Eagle, his hated contemporary, to 
get the Murdocks to print the eulogy in full and 
on the first page ! Henry employs an alliterative 
head writer on the Beacon, and we wondered 
whether he had decided to use " Wichita Weeps," 
or " State Stands Sorrowing." H he used the 
latter, it would make two lines and that would 
require a deck head. We could not decide, so 
we began talking of serious things. 

How quickly time has rolled the film since those 
early autumn days when the man who went to 
France was a hero in his town's eyes. Proces- 
sions and parades and pageants interminable have 
passed down America's main streets, all headed 
for France. And what proud pageants they 
were! Walking at the head of the line were the 
little limping handful of veterans of the Civil 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey ii 

War. After them came the middle-aged huskies 
of the Spanish War, and then, so very young, so 
boyish and so very solemn, came the soldiers for 
the great war — the volunteers, the National 
Guard, the soldiers of the new^ army; half ac- 
coutred, clad in nondescript uniforms, but proud 
and incorrigibly young. There had been ban- 
quets the week before, and speeches and flag ritu- 
als in public, but the night before, there had been 
tears and good-byes across the land. And all this 
in a few weeks; indeed it began during the long 
days in which we two sailed through the gulf 
stream, we two whose departure from our towns 
had seemed such a bold and hazardous adventure. 
When one man leaves a town upon an unusual en- 
terprise, it may look foolhardy ; but when a hun- 
dred leave upon the same adventure, it seems com- 
monplace. The danger in some way seems to be 
divided by the numbers. Yet in truth, numbers 
often multiply the danger. There was little dan- 
ger for Henry and me on the good ship Espagne 
with Red Cross stenographers and nurses and am- 
bulance drivers and Y. M. C. A. workers. No 
particular advantage would come to the German 
arms by torpedoing us. But as the Espagne, car- 
rying her peaceful passengers, all hurrying to Eu- 
rope on merciful errands, passed down the river 



12 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

and into the harbour that afternoon, we had seen 
a great grey German monster passenger boat, an 
interned leviathan of the sea in her dock. We had 
been told of how cunningly the Germans had scut- 
tled her; how they had carefully relaid electric 
wires so that every strand had to be retraced to 
and from its source, how they had turned the 
course of water pipes, all over the ship, how they 
had drawn bolts and with blow-pipes had rotted 
nuts and rods far in the dark places of the ship's 
interior, how they had scientifically disarranged 
her boilers so that they would not make steam, 
and as we saw the German boat looming up, deck 
upon deck, a floating citadel, with her bristling 
guns, we thought what a prize she would be when 
she put out to sea loaded to the guards with those 
handsome boys whom we had been seeing hustling 
about the country as they went to their training 
camps. Even to consider these things gave us a 
feeling of panic, and the recollection of the big 
boat in the dock began to bring the war to us, more 
vividly than it had come before. And then our 
first real martial adventure happened, thus: 

As we leaned over the rail that first night talk- 
ing of many things, in the blackness, without a 
glimmer from any porthole, with the decks as 
dark as Egypt, the ship shot ahead at twenty knots 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey 13 

an hour. In peace times it would be regarded as 
a crazy man's deed, to go whizzing along at full 
speed without lights. Henry had taken two long 
puffs on his cigar when out from the murk behind 
us came a hand that tapped his shoulder, and then 
a voice spoke: 

" You'll have to put out that cigar, sir. A sub- 
marine could see that five miles on a night like 
this!" 

So Henry doused his light, and the war came 
right home to us. 

The next day was uniform day on the boat, and 
the war came a bit nearer to us than ever. Scores 
of good people who had come on the boat in 
civilian clothes, donned their uniforms that sec- 
ond day; mostly Red Cross or Y. M. C. A. or 
American ambulance or Field Service uniforms. 
We did not don our uniforms, though Henry be- 
lieved that we should at least have a dress re- 
hearsal. The only regular uniforms on board 
were worn by a little handful of French soldiers, 
straggling home from a French political mission 
to America, and these French soldiers were the 
only passengers on the boat who had errands to 
France connected with the destructive side of the 
war. So not until the uniforms blazed out 
gorgeously did we realize what an elaborate and 



14 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

important business had sprung up in the recon- 
structive side of war. Here we saw a whole 
ship's company — hundreds of busy and success- 
ful men and women, one of scores and scores of 
ship's companies like it, that had been hurrying 
across the ocean every few days for three years, 
devoted not to trading upon the war, not to ex- 
ploiting the war, not even to expediting the busi- 
ness of " the gentle art of murdering," but de- 
voted to saving the waste of war! 

As the days passed, and " we sailed and we 
sailed," a sort of denatured pirate craft armed to 
the teeth with healing lotions to massage the 
wrinkled front of war, Henry kept picking at the 
ocean. It was his first transatlantic voyage ; for 
like most American men, he kept his European 
experiences in his wife's name. So the ocean 
bothered him. He understood a desert or a 
drouth, but here was a tremendous amount of un- 
necessary and unaccountable water. It was a 
calm, smooth, painted ocean, and as he looked at 
it for a long time one day, Henry remarked 
wearily : " The town boosters who secured this 
ocean for this part of the country rather overdid 
the job!" 

One evening, looking back at the level floor of 
the ocean stretching inimitably into the golden 




You'll have to put out that cigar, sir " 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey \y 

sunset, he mused : "■ They have a fine country 
here. You kind of like the lay of it, and there 
is plenty of nice sightly real estate about — it's a 
gently rolling country, uneven and something like 
College Hill in Wichita, but there's got to be a 
lot of money spent draining it; you can tell that 
at a glance, if the fellow gets anywhere with his 
proposition! " 

A time always comes in a voyage, when men 
and women begin to step out as individuals from 
the mass. With us it was the Red Cross ste- 
nographers and the American Ambulance boys 
who first ceased being ladyships and lordships and 
took their proper places in the cosmos. They 
were a gay lot — and young. And human nature 
is human nature. So the decks began to clutter 
up with boys and girls intensely interested in ex- 
ploring each other's lives. It Is after all the most 
wonderful game in the world. And while the 
chaperon fluttered about more or less, trying to 
shoo the girls off the dark decks at night, and 
while public opinion on the boat made eminently 
proper rules against young women in the smok- 
ing room, still young blood did have its way, 
which really is a good way ; better than we think, 
perhaps, who look back in cold blood and old 
blood. And by the token of our years it was 



1 8 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

brought to us that war is the game of youth. 
We were two middle-aged old coots — though 
still in our forties and not altogether blind to a 
pretty face — and yet the oldest people on the 
boat. Even the altruistic side of war is the game 
of youth. 

Perhaps it is the other way around, and maybe 
youth is the only game in the w^orld worth play- 
ing and that the gains of youth, service and suc- 
cess and follies and failures, are only the chips 
and counters. We were brought to these con- 
clusions more or less by a young person, a certain 
Miss Ingersoll, or perhaps her name only sounded 
like that ; for we called her the Eager Soul. And 
she was a pretty girl, too — American, pretty : 
Red hair — lots of blowy, crinkly red hair that 
was always threatening to souse her face and 
ears; blue eyes of the serious kind and a colour 
that gave us the impression that she did exercises 
and could jab a punching bag. Indeed before we 
met her, we began betting on the number of hours 
it would take her to tell us that she took a cold 
plunge every morning. Henry expected the 
statement on the second day; as a matter of fact 
it came late on the first day ! She was that kind. 
But there was no foolishness about her. She was 
a nurse — a Red Cross nurse, and she made it 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey 19 

clear that she had no illusions about men ; we sus- 
pected that she had seen them cut up and knew 
their innermost secrets! Nevertheless she was 
tremendously interesting, and because she, too, 
was from the middle west, and possibly because 
she realized that we accepted her for what she 
was, she often paced the rounds of the deck be- 
tween us. We teased her more or less about a 
young doctor of the Johns Hopkins unit who 
sometimes hovered over her deck chair and a cer- 
tain Gilded Youth — every boat-load has its 
Gilded Youth — whose father was president of 
so many industrial concerns, and the vice-presi- 
dent of so many banks and trust companies that 
it was hard to look at the boy without blinking at 
his gilding. Henry was betting on the Gilded 
Youth: so the young doctor fell to me. For the 
first three or four days during which we kept 
fairly close tab on their time, the Doctor had the 
Gilded Youth beaten two hours to one. Henry 
bought enough lemonade for me and smoking 
room swill of one sort and another to start his lit- 
tle old Wichita ocean. But it was plain that the 
Gilded Youth interested her. And in a confiden- 
tial moment filled with laughter and chaff and 
chatter she told us why : " He's patronizing me. 
I mean he doesn't know it, and he thinks I don't 



20 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

know it; but that's what he's doing. I interest 
him as a social specimen. I mean — I'm a bug 
and he likes to take me up and examine me. I 
think I'm the first ' Co-ed ' he ever has seen ; the 
first girl who voted and didn't let her skirts sag 
and still loved good candy! I mean that when 
he found in one half hour that I knew he wore 
nine dollar neckties and that I was for Roosevelt, 
the man nearly expired ; he was that puzzled ! 
I'm not quite the type of working girl whom 
Heaven protects and he chases, but — I mean I 
think he is wondering just how far Heaven really 
will protect my kind! When he decides," she 
confided in a final burst of laughter, and tucking 
away her overflowing red hair, " I may have to 
slap him — I mean don't you know — " 

And we did know. And being in his late for- 
ties Henry began tantalizing me with odds on the 
Gilded Youth. He certainly was a beautiful boy 
— tall, chestnut haired, clean cut, and altogether 
charming. He played Brahms and Irving Ber- 
lin with equal grace on the piano in the women's 
lounge on the ship and an amazing game of stud 
poker with the San Francisco boys in the smoking 
room. And it was clear that he regarded the 
Eager Soul as a social adventure somewhat higher 
than his mother's social secretary — but of the 




She often paced the rounds of the deck between us 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey 23 

same class. He was returning from a furlongh, 
to drive his ambulance in France, and the Doctor 
was going out to join his unit somewhere in 
France down near the Joan of Arc country. He 
told us shyly one day, as we watched the wake 
of the ship together, that he was to be stationed 
at an old chateau upon w^hose front is carved in 
stone, " I serve because I am served ! " When 
he did not repeat the motto we knew that it had 
caught him. He had been at home working on 
a germ problem connected with army life, hardly 
to be mentioned in the presence of Mrs. Boffin, 
and he was forever casually discussing his diffi- 
culties with the Eager Soul ; and a stenographer, 
who came upon the two at their tete-a-tete one 
day, ran to the girls in the lounge and gasped, 
" My Lord, Net, if you'd a heard it, you'd a 
jumped off the boat ! " 

As the passenger list began to resolve itself 
into familiar faces and figures and friends we 
became gradually aware of a pair of eyes — a 
pair of snappy black, female, French eyes. 
Speaking broadly and allowing for certain Em- 
poria and Wichita exceptions, eyes were no treat 
to us. Yet we fell to talking blithely of those 
eyes. Henry said if he had to douse his cigar 
on deck at night, the captain should make the 



24 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

Princess wear dimmers at night or stay indoors. 
We were not always sure she was a Princess. 
At times she seemed more Hke a Duchess or a 
Countess, according to her clothes. We never 
had seen such clothes! And millinery! We 
were used to Broadway; Michigan Avenue did 
not make us shy, and Henry had been in the 
South, But these clothes and the hats and the 
eyes — all full dress — were too many for us. 
And we fell to speculating upon exactly what 
would happen on Main Street and Commercial 
Street in Wichita and Emporia if the Duchess 
could sail down there in full regalia. Henry's 
place at table was where he got the full voltage 
of the eyes every time the Princess switched them 
on. And whenever he reached for the water and 
gulped it down, one could know he had been jolted 
behind his ordinary resisting power. And he 
drank enough to float a ship! As we wended 
our weary way over the decks during the long 
lonely hours of the voyage, we fell to theorizing 
about those eyes and we concluded that they were 
Latin — Latin chiefly engaged in the business of 
being female eyes. It was a new show to us. 
Our wives and mothers had voted at city elections 
for over thirty years and had been engaged for 
a generation in the business of taming their hus- 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey 25 

bands ; saving the meat from dinner for the hash 
for breakfast, and betimes for diversion, working 
in their dubs for the good of their towns; and 
their eyes had visions in them, not sex. So these 
female eyes showed us a mystery ! And each of 
us in his heart decided to investigate the phe- 
nomena. And on the seventh day we laid off 
from our work and called it good. We had met 
the Princess. Our closer view persuaded us that 
she might be thirty-five but probably was forty, 
though one early morning in a passage way we 
met her when she looked fifty, wan and sad and 
weary, but still flashing her eyes. And then one 
fair day, she turned her eyes from us for ever. 
This is what happened to me. But Henry him- 
self may have been the hero of the episode. Any- 
way, one of us was walking the deck with the 
Countess investigating the kilowat power of the 
eyes. He was talking of trivial things, possibly 
telling the lady fair of the new ten-story Beacon 
Building or of Henry Ganse's golf score on the 
Emporia Country Club links — anyway some- 
thing of broad, universal human interest. But 
those things seemed to pall on her. So he tried 
her on the narrow interests that engage the women 
at home — the suffrage question ; the matter of 
the eight-hour day and the minimum wage for 



26 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

women; and national prohibition. These things 
left her with no temperature. She was cold ; she 
even shivered, slightly, but gracefully withal, as 
she went swinging along on her toes, her silk 
sweater clinging like an outer skin to her slim 
lithe body, walking like a girl of sixteen. And 
constantly she was at target practice with her eyes 
with all her might and main. She managed to 
steer the conversation to a place where she could 
bemoan the cruel war; and ask what the poor 
women would do. Her Kansas partner sug- 
gested that life would be broader and better for 
women after the war, because they would have 
so much more important a part to do than before 
in the useful work of the world. " Ah, yes," she 
said, " perhaps so. But with the men all gone 
what shall we do when we want to be petted? " 
She made two sweet unaccented syllables of pet- 
ted in her ingenue French accent and added: 
" For you know women were made to be pet-ted." 
There was a bewildered second under the ma- 
chine gun fire of the eyes when her companion 
considered seriously her theory. He had never 
cherished such a theory before. But he was see- 
ing a new world, and this seemed to be one of the 
pleasant new things in it — this theory of the 
woman requiring to be pet-ted ! 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey 27 

Then the French Colonel hove in sight and she 
said: "Oh, yes — come on, Col-o-nel " — mak- 
ing three unaccented syllables of the word — 
" and we shall have ime femme sandweech." 
She gave the Colonel her arm. The miserable 
Kansan had not thought to take it, being busy 
with the Beacon Building or the water hazard at 
the Emporia Country Club, and then, as the 
Col-o-nel took her arm she lifted the Eyes to the 
stupid clod of a Kansan and switched on all the 
joyous incandescence of her lamps as she said, 
addressing the Frenchman but gazing sweetly 
at the American, " Col-o-nel, will you please carry 
my books?" They must have weighed six or 
eight ounces ! And she shifted them to the Col-o- 
nel as though they weighed a ton ! 

So the Kansan walked wearily to the smoking 
room to find his mate. They two then and there 
discussed the woman proposition in detail and 
drew up strong resolutions of respect for the 
Wichita and Emporia type, the American type 
that carries its own books and burdens and does 
not require of its men a silly and superficial 
chivalry and does not stimulate it by the ever- 
lasting lure of sex ! Men may die for the Prin- 
cess and her kind and enjoy death. We were 
willing that they should. We evinced no desire 



28 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

to impose our kultur on others. But after that 
day on the deck the Princess lost her lure for 
Henry and me! So we went to the front stoop 
of the boat and watched the Armenians drill. A 
great company of them was crowded in the 
steerage and all day long, with a sergeant major, 
they went through the drill. They were return- 
ing to Europe to fight with the French army and 
avenge the wrongs of their people. When they 
tired of drilling, they danced, and when they 
tired of dancing, they sang. It was queer music 
for civilized ears, the Armenian songs they sang. 
It was written on a barbaric scale with savage 
cadences and broken time ; but it was none the less 
sweet for being weird. It had the charm and 
freedom of the desert in it, and was as foreign as 
the strange brown faces that lifted toward us as 
they sang. 

" What is that music? " asked the Kansans of 
a New England b.oy in khaki who had been play- 
ing Greig that day for them on the piano. 
" That," nodded the youth toward the Armenians. 
" Oh, that — why that's the ' Old Oaken 
Bucket ! ' " His face did not relax and he went 
away whistling ! So there we were. The Col-o- 
nel and the lady with their idea on the woman 
question, the Armenians with their bizarre 




Col-0-nel, will you please carry my books ? " 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey 31 

music, the Yankee with his freaky humour, and 
the sedentary gold dust twins from Kansas, and 
a great boat-load of others like them in their 
striking differences of ideals and notions, all hur- 
rying across the world to help in the great fight 
for democracy which, in its essence, is only the 
right to live in the world, each man, each cult, 
each race, each blood and each nation after its 
own kind. And about all the war involves is the 
right to live, and to love one's own kind of 
women, one's own kind of music, one's own kind 
of humour, one's own kind of philosophy; know- 
ing that they are not perfect and understanding 
their limitations; trusting to time and circum- 
stance to bring out the fast colours of life in the 
eternal wash. Thinking thoughts like these that 
night, Henry's bunk-mate could not sleep. So 
he slipped on a grey overcoat over his pajamas 
and put on a grey hat and grey rubber-soled shoes, 
and went out on deck into the hot night that falls 
in the gulf stream in summer. It was the murky 
hour before dawn and around and around the 
deck he paced noiselessly, a grey, but hardly gaunt 
spectre in the night. The deck chairs were filled 
with sleepers from the berths below decks. At 
last, wearying of his rounds, the spectre stopped 
to gaze over the rail at the water and the stars 



32 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

•when he heard this from a deck chair behind him, 
" Wake up, Net — for God's sake wake up ! " 
whispered a frightened woman's voice. " There's 
that awful thing again that scared me so awhile 
ago!" 

Even at the latter end of the journey the ocean 
interested us. An ocean always seems so un- 
reasonable to inlanders. And that morning when 
there was " a grey mist on the sea's face and a 
grey dawn breaking," Henry came alongside and 
looked at the seascape, all twisting and writhing 
and tossing and billowing, up and down and side- 
ways. He also looked at his partner who was 
gradually growing pale and wan and weary. 
And Henry heard this : " She's on a bender ; 
she's Iz about ten feet during the night, I guess 
ther^ s been rain somewhere up near the head- 
waters or else the fellow took his finger out of 
the hole in the dyke. Anyway, she'll be out of 
her banks before breakfast. I don't want any 
breakfast; I'm going to bed for the day." And 
he went. 

During the day Henry brought the cheerful in- 
formation that the Doctor was down and that the 
Eager Soul and the Gilded Youth were wearing 
out the deck. Henry also added that her slap- 
ping was scheduled for that night. 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey 33 

" Has her hair slopped over yet? " This from 
me. 

" No," answered Henry, " but it's getting 
crinkHer and crinkher and she looks pinker and 
pinker, and prettier and prettier, and you ought 
to see her in her new purple sweater. She sprang 
that on the boat this afternoon! It's laying 'em 
out in swaths ! " Henry's affinity was afraid to 
turn off his back. But he turned a pale face 
toward his side-kick and whispered : " Henry, 
you tell her," he gulped before going on, " that 
if she can't find anyone else to slap, there's a 
man down here who can't fight back ! " 

A sense of security comes to one who chums 
along seven days on a calm sea on an eventless 
voyage. .And the French, by easy-going ways, 
stimulate that sense of security; we had I ;ard 
weird stories of boat-drills at daybreak, of mid- 
night alarms and of passengers sleeping on deck 
in their life preservers, and we were prepared for 
the thrills which Wichita and Emporia expected 
us to have. They never came. One afternoon, 
seven or eight days out, we had notice at noon 
that we would 'try on our life preservers that 
afternoon. The life preservers were thrown on 
our beds by the stewards and at three o'clock each 
passenger appeared beside the life-boat assigned 



34 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

to him, donned his Hfe-belt which gave him a 
ridiculously stuffed appearance, answered to a 
roll-call, guyed those about him after the manner 
of old friends, and waited for something else. 
It never came. The ship's officers gradually 
faded from the decks and the passengers, after 
standing around foolishly for a time, disappeared 
one by one into their cabins and bloomed out 
again with their life-belts moulted ! That was the 
last we heard of the boat-drill or the life-belts. 
The French are just that casual. 

But one evening at late twilight the ship went 
a-flutter over a grisly incident that brought us 
close up to the war. We were gathered in the 
dusk looking at a sailing ship far over to the 
south — a mere speck on the horizon's edge. 
Signals began to twinkle from her and we felt 
our ship give a lurch and turn north zigzagging 
at full speed. The signals of the sailing ship 
were distress signals, but we sped away from her 
as fast as our engines would take us, for, though 
her signals may have been genuine, also they 
may have been a U-boat lure. Often the Ger- 
mans have used the lure of distress signals on a 
sailing ship and when a rescuer has appeared, the 
U-boat has sent to death the Good Samaritan of 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey 35 

the sea! It is awful. But the German has put 
mercy off the sea! 

Some way the average man goes back to his 
home environment for his moral standards, and 
that night as we walked the deck, Henry broke 
out with this : " I've been thinking about this 
U-boat business; how it would be if we had the 
German's job. I have been trying to think if 
there is any one in Wichita who could go out and 
run a U-boat the way these Germans run U-boats, 
and I've been trying to imagine him sitting on the 
front porch of the Country Club or down at the 
Elks Club talking about it; telling how he lured 
the captain of a ship by his distress signal to 
come to the rescue of a sinking ship and then 
destroyed the rescuer, and I've been trying to 
figure out how the fellows sitting around him 
would take it. They'd get up and leave. He 
would be outcast as unspeakable and no brag or 
blufif or blare of victory would gloss over his act. 
We simply don't think the German way. We 
have a loyalty to humanity deeper than our pa- 
triotism. There are certain things self-respect- 
ing men can't do and live in Wichita. But there 
seem to be no restrictions in Germany. The 
U-boat captain using the distress signal as a lure 



36 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

probably holds about such a place in his home 
town as Charley Carey, our banker, or Walter 
Innes, our dry goods man. He is doubtless a 
leading citizen of some German town; doubtless 
a kind father, a good husband and maybe a 
pillar of the church. And I suppose town and 
home and church will applaud him when he goes 
back to Germany to brag about his treachery. In 
Wichita, town and home and church would be 
ashamed of Charley Carey and Walter Innes if 
they came back to brag about killing men who 
were lured to death by responding to the call of 
distress." 

And so, having disposed of the psychology of 
the enemy, we turned in for the night. We were 
entering the danger zone and the night was hot. 
A few passengers slept on deck ; but most of the 
ship's company went to their cabins. We didn't 
seem to be afraid. We presumed that our con- 
voy would appear in the morning. But when 
it failed to appear we assumed that there was no 
danger. No large French passenger boat had 
been sunk by the Germans ; this fact we heard a 
dozen times that day. It soothed us. The day 
passed without bringing our convoy. Again we 
went to bed, realizing rather clearly that the 
French do take things casually; and believing 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey 37 

firmly that the convoys would come with the 
dawn. But dawn came and brought no convoy. 
We seemed to be nearing land. The horizon was 
rarely without a boat. The day grew bright. 
We were almost through the danger zone. We 
went to lunch a gay lot, all of us ; but we hurried 
back to the deck ; not uneasily, not in fear, under- 
stand, but just to be on deck, looking landward. 
And then at two o'clock it appeared. Far off in 
the northeast was a small black dot in the sky. 
It looked like a seabird ; but it grew. In ten min- 
utes the whole deck was excited. Every glass 
was focused on the growing black spot. And 
then it loomed up the size of a baseball ; it showed 
colour, a dull yellow in the distance and then it 
swelled and took form and glowed brighter and 
came rushing toward us, as large as a moon, as 
large as a barrel, and then we saw its outlines, 
and it came swooping over us, a great beautiful 
golden thing and the whole deck burst into cheers. 
It was our convoy, a dirigible balloon — vivid 
golden yellow, trimmed with blue! How fair it 
seemed. How graceful and how surely and how 
powerfully it circled about the ship like a great 
hovering bird, and how safe we felt; and as 
we cheered and cheered the swirling, glowing, 
beautiful thing, we knew how badly frightened 



38 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

we really had been. With danger gone, the ten- 
sion lifted and we read the fear in our hearts. A 
torpedo boat destroyer came lumbering across the 
sky line. It also was to convoy us, but it had a 
most undramatic entrance; and besides we had 
sighted land. The deck cheered easily, so we 
cheered the land. And everyone ran about ex- 
claiming to everyone else about the wonder and 
splendour of the balloon, and everyone took pic- 
tures of everyone else and promised to send 
prints, and the land waxed fat and loomed large 
and hospitable while Henry paced the deck with 
his hands clasped reflectively behind him. He 
was deeply moved and language didn't satisfy him 
much. Finally he took his fellow Kansan by the 
arm and pointed to the magnificence of the hover- 
ing spectre in yellow and blue that circled about 
the ship : 

" Bill," he said, solemnly, " isn't she a peach! " 
He paused, then from his heart he burst out: 
" ' How beautiful upon the mountain are the feet 
of them that bring glad tidings ! ' I wish the 
fellows in Wichita could get this thing for the 
wheat show ! " 

And thus we came to the shores of sunny 
France, a land that was to remind us over and 
over again of our own sunny land of Kansas. 



We Begin Our Sentimental Journey 39 

We landed after dark. Every one was going 
about vowing deathless friendship to every one 
else, and so far as the stenographers and the am- 
bulance boys were concerned, it came to Henry 
and me that we meant it; for they were a fine 
lot, just joyous, honest, brave young Americans 
going out to do their little part in a big enter- 
prise. While we were bidding good-bye to our 
boys and girls, we kept a weather eye on the 
Eager Soul. She had hooked the Gilded Youth 
fairly deeply. He saw that her trunk came up 
from the hold, but we noticed that while he was 
gone, the Doctor showed up and went with her 
to sort out her hand-baggage from the pile on the 
deck. The gang plank was let down under a pair 
of smoky torches. And the Gilded Youth had 
paid a fine tip some place to be permitted to be 
the first passenger off the boat that he might get 
one of the two taxis in sight for the Eager Soul. 
She followed him, but she made him let the Doc- 
tor come along. And so the drinks — lemon 
squash and buttermilk — were equally on Henry 
and me. We hurried down the gang plank after 
the happy trio. They were young — so infi- 
nitely and ineffably young, it seemed to us. And 
the girl's face was flushed and joyous, and her 
hair — why it didn't shake out and drown her 



40 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

we never knew; certainly it surged out from 
under her hat Hke ripples of youth incarnate. 
We saw them stacking their valises in the taxi and 
over the taxi and around the taxi and the last we 
saw of her was when she bent out of the cab 
window and waved and smiled" at us, two sedate 
old parties alone there in the crowd, with the 
French language rising to our ears as we teetered 
unsteadily into it. 

What an adventure they were going into — 
what a new adventure, the new and beautiful ad- 
venture of youth, the old and inexplicable adven- 
ture of life! So we waved back at them so long 
as they were in sight, and the white handkerchief 
of the Eager Soul fluttered back from the disap- 
pearing cab. When it was gone, Henry turned 
to a sad-looking cabman with a sway-backed 
carriage and explained with much eloquence that 
we wanted him to haul us a la hotel France — 
toot sweet! 




So we waved back at them so long as they were in 

sight 



CHAPTER II 

IN WHICH WE OBSERVE THE " ROCKET's RED 
GLARE " 

BORDEAUX is the " Somewhere in France " 
from which cablegrams from passengers on 
the French Hners usually are sent. This will be 
no news to the Germans, nor to Americans who 
read the advertisements of the French liners, but 
it may be news to Americans who receive the mys- 
terious cablegrams " from a French port," after 
their friends have landed. It is a dear old town, 
mouldy, and weather-beaten, and mediaeval, this 
Bordeaux, with high, mysterious walls along the 
streets over which hang dusty branches of trees 
or vines sneaking mischievously out of bounds. 
A woe-begone trolley creaks through the narrow 
streets and heart-broken cabmen mourning over 
the mistakes of misspent lives, larrup disconsolate 
horses over stony streets as they creak and jog 
and wheeze ahead of the invisible crows that seem 
always to be hovering above ready to batten upon 

43 



44 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

their rightful provender. For an hour in the 
morning before our train left for Paris we char- 
tered one of the ramshackle cabs of the town and 
took in Bordeaux. It was vastly unlike either 
Emporia or Wichita, or anything in Kansas, or 
anything in America; or so far as that goes, to 
Henry and me, it was unlike anything else in the 
wide and beautiful world. " All this needs," said 
Henry, as he lolled back upon the moth-eaten 
cushions of the hack that banged its iron rims on 
the cobbles beneath us, and sent the thrill of it 
into our teeth, " all this needs is Mary Pick ford 
and a player organ to be a good film ! " The 
only thing we saw that made us homesick was 
the group of firemen in front of the engine house 
playing checkers or chess or something. But the 
town had an historic interest for us as the home 
of the Girondists of the French Revolution; so 
we looked up their monument and did proper 
reverence to them. They were moderate idealists 
who rose during the first year of the revolution; 
we thought them much like the Bull Moosers. 
So we did what homage we could to the Girondists 
who were run over by the revolutionary band 
wagon and sent to the guillotine during the Ter- 
ror. For we knew; indeed into the rolly-poly 
necks of Henry and me, in our own politics, the 



The " Rocket's Red Glare " 45 

knife had bitten many times. So we stood before 
what seemed to be the proper monument with 
sympathetic eyes and uncovered heads for a sec- 
ond before we took the train for Paris. 

All day long we rode through the only peace- 
ful part of France we were to see in our mar- 
tial adventures. It was fair and fat and smiling 
— that France that lay between the river Gironde 
and Paris, and all day we rode through its beauty 
and its richness. The thing which we missed 
most from the landscape, being used to the Amer- 
ican landscape, was the automobile. We did not 
see one in the day's journey. In Kansas alone 
there are 190,000 continually pervading the land- 
scape. We had yet to learn that there are no pri- 
vate automobiles in France, that the government 
had commandeered all automobiles and that even 
the taxis of Paris have but ten gallons of gasoline 
a day allotted to each of them. So we gazed at 
the two-wheeled carts, the high, bony, strong 
white oxen, the ribbons of roads, hard-surfaced 
and beautiful, wreathing the gentle hills, and 
longed for a car to make the journey past the fine 
old chateaux that flashed in and out of our vision 
behind the hills. War was a million miles away 
from the pastoral France that we saw coming up 
from Bordeaux. 



46 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

But in Paris war met us far out in the suburbs, 
where at dusk a great flock of airplanes from a 
training camp buzzed over us and sailed along 
with the train, distancing us and returning to 
play with us like big sportive birds. The train 
was filled with our shipmates from the boat 
and we all craned our necks from the windows 
to look at the wonderful sight of the air covey 
that fluttered above us. Even the Eager Soul, 
our delicious young person with her crinkly red 
hair and serious eyes, disconnected herself long 
enough from the Gilded Youth and the Young 
Doctor " for to admire and for to see," the air- 
planes. 

But the airplanes gave us the day's first oppor- 
tunity to talk to the Eager Soul. Until dusk the 
Gilded Youth had kept her in his donjon — a 
first class compartment jammed with hand-bag- 
gage, and where she had insisted that the Young 
Doctor should come also. We knew that with- 
out being told ; also it was evident as we passed 
up and down the car aisle during the day that she 
was acting as a sort of human Baedeker to the 
Young Doctor, while the Gilded Youth, to whom 
chateaux and French countryside were an old, 
old story, sat by and hooted. But the airplanes 
pulled him out of his donjon keep and the Young 



The "Rocket's Red Glare" 47 

Doctor with him. He wasn't above showing the 
Young Doctor how much a Gilded Youth really 
knows about mechanics and airplanes, and we 
slipped in and chatted with the Eager Soul. We 
had a human interest in the contest between the 
Gilded Youth and the Young Doctor, and a sport- 
ing interest which centered in the daily score. 
And we gathered this : That it was the Young 
Doctor's day. For he was in France to help the 
greatest cause in the world ; and the Gilded Youth 
affected to be in France — to enjoy the greatest 
outdoor game in the world. But he had made it 
plain that day to the Eager Soul that working 
eighteen hours a day under shell fire, driving an 
ambulance, was growing tame. He was going 
back, of course, but he was thinking seriously of 
the air service. The Doctor wanted no thrills. 
He was willing to boil surgical instruments or 
squirt disinfectant around kitchens to serve. And 
the Eager Soul liked that attitude, though it was 
obvious to us, that she was in the war game as a 
bit of a sport and because it was too dull in her 
Old Home Town, " somewhere in the United 
States." And we knew also what she did not ad- 
mit, even if she recognized it, that in the Old 
Home Town, men of the sort to attract women of 
her spirit and intelligence were scarce — and she 



48 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

was out looking for her own Sir Galahad, as he 
went up and down the earth searching for the 
Holy Grail. The war to her, we knew, was a 
great opportunity to enjoy the new freedom of her 
sex, to lose her harem veil, to breathe free air as 
an achieving human creature — but, alas ! one's 
forties are too wise. Pretty as she was, innocent 
as she was, and eager as her soul was in high 
emprise of the conflict of world ideals into which 
she was plunging, we felt that, after all, hidden 
away deeply in the secret places of her heart, were 
a man and a home and children. 

We whizzed through the dusk in the suburbs 
of Paris that night, seeing the gathering imple- 
ments of war coming into the landscape for the 
first time — the army trucks, the horizon blue of 
the French uniform, the great training camps, the 
Red Cross store houses, the scores and scores of 
hospitals that might be seen in the public build- 
ings with Red Cross flags on them, the munition 
plants pouring out their streams of women work- 
ers in their jumpers and overalls. 

The girl porters came through and turned on 
the lights in the train. No lights outside told us 
that we were hurrying through a great city. 
Paris was dark. We went through the under- 
ground where there was more light than there was 



The "Rocket's Red Glare" 49 

above ground. The streets seemed like tunnels 
and the tunnels like streets. We came into the 
dingy station and a score of women porters and 
red capped girls came for our baggage. They ran 
the trucks, they moved the express ; they took care 
of the mail, and through them we edged up the 
stairway into the half-lighted station and looked 
out into the night — black, lampless, engulfing — 
and it was Paris ! 

It was nine o'clock as we stood on the thresh- 
old of the station peering into the murk. Not a 
taxi was in the stand waiting; but from afar we 
could hear a great honking of auto-horns, that 
sounded like the night calls of monster birds flit- 
ting over the city. The air was vibrant with 
these wild calls. We were an hour waiting there 
in the gloom for a conveyance. But when we 
left the wide square about the station, and came 
into the streets of Paris, we understood why the 
auto horns were bellowing so. For the automo- 
biles were running lickety-split through the dark- 
ness without lights and the howls of their horns 
pierced the night. The few street lights burning 
a low candle power at the intersections of the 
great boulevards were hooded and cast but a pale 
glow on the pavements. And as we rode from 
our station and passed the Tuileries and the Rue 



50 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

de Rivoli, save for the dim outline of the iron rail- 
ings of the Gardens ten feet from our cab window, 
we had no sign to mark our way. Yet our cab 
whizzed along at a twenty-five mile gait, and every 
few seconds a great blatting devil would honk out 
of the darkness, and whirl past us, and sometimes 
we would be abreast of another and the fiendish 
horns of us would go screaming in chorus as we 
raced and passed and repassed one another on the 
broad street. The din was nerve racking — but 
highly Parisian. One fancied that Paris, being 
denied its lights, made up its quota of sensation 
by multiplying its sound ! 

We went to the Ritz — now smile ; the others 
did ! Not that the Ritz is an inferior hotel. We 
went there because it was really the grandee 
among Paris hotels. Yet every day we were in 
Paris when we told people we were at the Ritz, 
they smiled. The human mind doesn't seem to 
be able to associate Henry and me with the Ritz 
without the sense of the eternal fitness of things 
going wapper-jawed and catawampus. We are 
that kind of men. Wichita and Emporia are 
written large and indelibly upon us ; and the Ritz, 
which is the rendezvous of the nobility, merely 
becomes a background for our rusticity — the 
spotlight which reveals the everlasting jay in us ! 



The "Rocket's Red Glare" 51 

We went to the Ritz largely because it seemed to 
me that as a leading American orator, Henry- 
should have proper European terminal facilities. 
And the Ritz looked to me like the proper setting 
for an international figure. There, it seemed to 
me, the rich and the great would congregate to 
invite him to dinners, and to me, at least, who 
had imagination, there seemed something rather 
splendid in fancying the gentry saying, " Ah, 
yes — Henry J. Allen, of Wichita — the next 
governor of Kansas, I understand ! " Henry in- 
dicated his feeling about the Ritz thus : The 
night we arrived he failed, for the first time in 
two weeks, to demand a dress rehearsal in our 
$17.93 uniforms from 43rd Street in New York. 
The gold braided uniforms that we saw in the 
corridors of the Ritz that night made us pause 
and consider many things. When we unpacked 
our valises, there were the little bundles just as 
they had come from 43rd Street. Henry tucked 
his away with a sigh, and just before he went 
to sleep he called across the widening spaces be- 
tween sleep and wakening : " I suppose we 
might have bought that $23.78 outfit, easy 
enough ! " 

It was in the morning that the veneer of the 
Ritz began to wear off for Henry. He had 



52 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

pulled a bath and found it cold; they were con- 
serving fuel and no hot water was allowed in the 
hotels of Paris ej^cepting Friday and Saturday 
nights. The English, who are naturally mean, 
declare that the French save seventy-five per cent 
of the use of their hot water by putting the two 
hot water nights together, as no living Frenchman 
ever took a bath two consecutive days. But it 
did not seem that way to Henry and me. And 
anyway we heard these theories later. But that 
morning Henry, who doesn't really mind a cold 
bath, was ready for it when he happened to look 
around the bathroom and found there wasn't a 
scrap of soap. There he was, as one might say, 
au natural, or perhaps better — if one should 
include the dripping from his first plunge — one 
might say he was au jus ! And what is more, he 
was au mad. He jabbed the bell button that sum- 
moned the valet, and when the boy appeared 
Henry had his speech ready for him. " Donnez 
mo-i some soap here and be mighty blame toot 
sweet about it ! " The valet explained that soap 
was not furnished with the room. It took some 
time to get that across in broken French and 
English ; then Henry, talking very slowly and in 
his best oratorical voice, with his foot on the for- 
tissimo, cried : " Say ! We are paying," at the 




Donnez moi some soap here and be mighty blame 
toot sweet about it ! " 



The "Rocket's Red Glare" 55 

dazed look in the valet's face Henry repeated 
slower and louder, " We are paying, I say, fif- 
teen-dollars — fif-teen dollars a day for these 
rooms. You go ask Mrs. Ritz if she will furnish 
soap for twenty?" And he waved the valet 
grandly out. 

An hour later we sallied forth to see Paris in 
war timCo Our way lay through the lonely Ven- 
dome, out by the empty Rue Castiglione, down the 
Rue de Rivoli. So we came into the great beau- 
tiful Place de la Concorde; and what a wide and 
magnificent waste it was. Now and then a way- 
farer might be seen crossing its splendid distances, 
or a taxicab spinning along through the statuesque 
grandeur of the place. But the few moving ob- 
jects in the white stretch of marble and cement 
only accented its lonely aspect. The circle of 
the French provinces was as desolate as the Pom- 
peiian Forum, and save for the bright colours 
of the banks of flowers that were heaped upon 
the monuments to Alsace and Lorraine, the place 
might have been an excavation rather than the 
heart of a great world metropolis. Before the 
war, to cross the Place de la Concorde and go 
into the Champs Elysees was an adventure of a 
life time. One took one's chances. One sur- 
vived, but he had his thrills. But that morning 



56 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

we might have walked safely with bowed head 
and hands clasped behind us through the Place, 
across the Elysian fields; there we sat for a 
moment in one of the Babylonian cafes and saw 
nothing more shocking than the beautiful women 
of France gathering in the abandoned cafes and 
music halls to assemble surgical dressings for the 
French wounded. 

In due course, in that first day of our pil- 
grimage in Europe, we came to the headquarters 
of the American Red Cross in the Place de la 
Concorde. The five floors of a building once 
used for a man's club are now filled with bustling, 
hustling Americans. Those delicately tinted 
souls in Europe who are homesick for Broadway 
may find it in the office of the American Red 
Cross; but they will find lower Broadway, not 
the place of the bright lights. The click and clat- 
ter of typewriters punctuate the air. Natty ste- 
nographers, prim office women, matronly looking 
heads of departments, and assistants from per- 
haps the tubercular department, the reconstruction 
department, the bureau of home relief in Paris, 
or what not, move briskly through the corridors. 
In the reception rooms are men from the ends of 
the earth — Rumanians, Serbians, Armenians, 
Belgians, Boers, Russians, Japs — every nation 



The "Rocket's Red Glare" 57 

at peace with America has some business some- 
time in that Paris office of the American Red 
Cross. For there abides the commissioner of the 
Red Cross for all Europe. At that time he was 
a spare, well made man in his late thirties, — 
Major Grayson M.-P. Murphy; a West Pointer 
who left the army fifteen years ago after service 
in the Philippines, started " broke " in New York 
peddling insurance, and quit business last June 
vice-president of the largest trust company in the 
world, making the climb at considerable speed, but 
without much noise. He was the quietest man in 
Paris. He was so quiet that he had to have a 
muffler cut-out on his own great heart to keep it 
from drowning his voice! There is a soft lisp 
in his speech which might fool strangers who 
do not know about the steel of his nerves and the 
keenness of his eye. He sat in a roomy office with 
a clean desk, toyed with a paper knife and made 
quick, sure, accurate decisions in a low hesitant 
voice that never backed track nor weakened be- 
fore a disagreeable situation. He is the man who 
more than anyone else has laid out the spending 
of the major part of the first one hundred mil- 
lions gathered in America by the Red Cross drive 
last summer. He held his rank as Major in the 
United States army, and wore his uniform as 



/■ 



58 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

though it were his skin, clean, unwrinkled and 
handsome, with that gorgeous quaHty of uncon- 
scious pride that is, after all, the West Pointer's 
real grace. 

As we sat in that noble room, looking out 
across the Place de la Concorde, past the Obelisk 
to the House of Deputies beyond the Seine, it 
was evident that Henry was thinking hard. The 
spectacle of Major Murphy's young men in their 
habiliments of service, Red Cross military uni- 
forms that made them look like lilies of the val- 
ley and bright and morning stars, gave us both 
something to think about. The recollection of 
those $17.93 uniforms of ours in the rooms at the 
Ritz was disquieting. We had service hats ; these 
young gods wore brown caps with leather visors 
and enameled Red Crosses above the leather. 
We had cotton khaki tunics unadorned, and of a 
vintage ten years old. They had khaki worsted 
of a cut to conform to the newest general order. 
They had Sam Browne belts of high potency, and 
we had no substitute even for that insignia of 
power. They had shiny leather puttees. We 
had tapes. They had brown shoes — we had 
not given a fleeting thought to shoes. We might 
as well have had congress gaiters ! So when the 
conversation with Major Murphy turned to a 



The " Rocket's Red Glare " 59 

point where he said that he expected us to go 
with him to the French front immediately he 
took a look at our Sunday best Emporia and 
Wichita civilian clothes and asked casually, 
"Have you gentlemen uniforms?" For me 
right there the cock crowed three times. Henry 
heard it also, and answered slowly, " Well, no — 
not exactly." 

" Mr. Hoppen," said the Major, " take these 
gentlemen down the street and show them where 
to get uniforms!" Which Mr. Hoppen went 
and did. Now Mr. Hoppen is related to the 
Morgans — the J. Pierpont Morgans — and he 
has small notion of Emporia and Wichita. So 
he took us to a tailor shop after his own heart. 
We chose a modest outfit, with no frills. We 
ordered one pair of riding breeches each, and one 
tunic each, and one American army cap each. 
The tunic was to conform to the recent Army 
regulation for Red Cross tunics, and the trousers 
were to match ; Henry looked at me and received 
a distress signal, but he ignored it and said non- 
chalantly, "When can we have them?" The 
tailor told us to call for a fitting in two weeks, but 
we were going to the front before that. That 
made no difference ; and then Henry came to the 
real point. " How much," he asked, " will these 



6o Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

be ? " The tailor answered in francs and we 
quickly divided the sum into dollars. It made 
$ioo. "For both?" asked Henry hopefully. 
" For each," answered the tailor firmly. There 
stood Mr. Hoppen, of Morgans. There also 
stood Wichita and Emporia. Henry's eyes did 
not bat; Mr. Hoppen wore a shimmering Sam 
Browne belt. Looking casually at it Henry asked : 

" Shall we require one of those ? " 

" Gentlemen are all wearing them, sir," an- 
swered the tailor. 

" How much? " queried Henry. 

" Well, you gentlemen are a trifle thick, sir, 
and we'll have to have them specially made, but I 
presume we may safely say $14 each, sir! " 

Henry did not even look at me, but lifted the 
wormwood to his lips and quaffed it. " Make 
two," he answered. 

The world should not be unsafe for democracy 
if Wichita and Emporia could help it! 

We went to a show that night with the feeling 
of guilt and shame one has who has betrayed his 
family. That $114 with ten more to come for 
brown shoes, flickered in the spot light and bab- 
bled on the lips of the singers. They danced it 
in the ballet. Each of us was thinking with 
guilty horror of how he would break the news of 



The "Rocket's Red Glare" 6i 

that uniform bargain to his wife. So we went 
home tired that first night, through the grim dark 
streets of Paris and to our rooms. And there 
were those 43rd street uniforms still unwrapped 
in the bureau drawer, Henry again demanded a 
dress rehearsal. He insisted that as we were go- 
ing to have to wear them to the front we ought to 
know how we looked inside of them. But we 
were weary and again put off the dread hour. 
The next morning we bought our ten dollar 
brown shoes, and concluded that there was a vast 
amount of foolishness connected with this war. 

During the long fair days while we waited for 
Major Murphy to take us to the front, we wan- 
dered about Paris, puffing and spluttering through 
the French language. Henry never was sure of 
anything but toot sweet and some devilish per- 
version was forever sticking sophomore German 
into my mouth, when French should have risen. 
The German never actually broke out. If it had, 
we should have been shot as spies. But it was so 
close that it always seemed to be snooping around 
ready to jump out. That made it hard for me 
to shine in French. 

These adventures with the French language 
were not exactly the martial adventures that 
Charley Chandler, of Wichita, and Warren Fin- 



62 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

ney, of Emporia, thought we would be having at 
the Front, when they trundled us out to win the 
war. Yet these adventures were serious. They 
were adventures in lonesomeness. We could 
imagine how the American soldier boy would feel 
and what he would say when this language began 
to wash about his ears and submerge him in its 
depths. We could fancy American soldiers wan- 
dering through the French villages, unable to buy 
things, because they couldn't understand the 
prices. We could understand the dreary, bleak, 
isolated lives of these American boys, with all the 
desolation of foreigners hungering always for 
human companionship, outside of the everlasting 
camp. And we came to know the misery of 
homesickness that hides in the phrase, " a stranger 
in a strange land ! " 

So we were glad to summon the Eager Soul to 
dine with us, and we let her order a dinner so 
complicated that it tasted like a lexicon! We 
learned much about the Eager Soul that night. 
She told us of her two college degrees, her year's 
teaching experience, her four years' nursing, and 
her people in the old home town. Bit by bit, we 
picked out her status from the things she dropped 
inadvertently. And that night in our rooms we 
assembled the parts of the puzzle thus ; one ram- 



The "Rocket's Red Glare" 63 

bling Bedford limestone American castle in the 
Country Club district; two cars, with garage to 
match ; a widowed mother, a lamented father who 
made all kinds of money, so naturally some of it 
was honest money; two brothers, a married sis- 
ter; a love for Henry James, and Galsworthy; 
substantial familiarity with Ibsen, Hauptman, 
Bergsen, Wagner, Puccini, Brahms, Freud, 
Tschaikovsky, and Bernard Shaw; a whole- 
hearted admiration for Barrie; and a record as or- 
ganizer in the suffrage campaign which won in her 
state three years ago, plus a habit of buying gloves 
by the dozen and candy in five pound boxes ! We 
could not prove it, but we agreed that she prob- 
ably bossed her mother and that the brothers' 
wives hated her and the sister's husband loved 
her to death! She was one of those socially as- 
sured persons in the Old Home Town who are 
never afraid of themselves out of it! She con- 
fessed that she had seen more or less of the 
Gilded Youth, before he left for Verdun, and in 
a pyrotechnic display of dimples, she admitted 
that she had gone to the station to bid the Young 
Doctor good-bye. She had been assigned to a 
hospital near the Verdun sector, and was going 
out the following day. When we left her at the 
door of the Hotel Vouillemont, we plunged back 



64 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

into the encircling gloom of the French language 
with real regret. 

As we went further into the life about us, we 
felt that all the men were in uniform and all the 
women in mourning. The French mourn beau- 
tifully. France today is the world's tragedy 
queen whose suffering is all genuine, but all mag- 
nificently done. In the shop windows of the 
Boulevards, and along the Avenue of the Opera 
are no bright colours — excepting for men's uni- 
forms. In the windows of the millinery shops, 
purple is the gayest colour — purple and laven- 
der and black prevail. On every street are 
blind windows of departed shops. Some bear 
signs notifying customers that they are closed for 
the duration of the war; others simply stare 
blankly and piteously at passersby who know the 
story without words. 

Yet if it is not a gay Paris, it is anything but a 
sad Paris. Rather it is a busy Paris; a Paris 
that stays indoors and works. For an hour or 
two after twilight the crowds come out; Sunday 
also they throng the boulevards. And the thea- 
tres are always well filled; and there the bright 
dress uniforms of the men overcome the sombre 
gowns of the women and the scenes in lobbies 
and foyers are not far from brilliant. Bands and 



The "Rocket's Red Glare" 65 

orchestras play in the theatres, but the music 
lacks fire. It is beautiful music, carefully done, 
artistically executed, but the orchestras are made 
up for the most part of men past the military 
age. We heard " La Tosca " one afternoon and in 
the orchestra sat twenty men with grey hair and 
the tenor was fat! As the season grew old, we 
heard " Louise," " Carmen," " Aphrodite," " But- 
terfly" (in London), and " Aida " (in Milan), 
and always the musical accompaniment to the 
social vagaries of these ladies who are no better 
than they should be, was music from old heads 
and old hearts. The " other lips and other hearts 
whose tales of love " should have been told 
ardently through fiddle and clarinet are toying 
with the great harp of a thousand strings that 
plays the dance of death. That is the music 
the young men are playing in Europe today. But 
in Paris, busy, drab, absent-minded Paris, the 
music that should be made from the soul of youth, 
crying into reeds and strings and brass is an echo, 
an echo altogether lovely but passionless! 

Finally our season of waiting ended. We 
came home to the Ritz at midnight from a dinner 
with Major Murphy, where we had been notified 
that we were to start for the front the next morn- 
ing. We told him that the new uniforms were 



66 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

not yet ready and confessed to him that we had 
the cheap uniforms ; he looked resigned. He had 
been entertaining a regular callithumpian parade 
of Red Cross commissioners from America, and 
he probably felt that he had seen the worst and 
that this was just another cross. But when we 
reached our rooms that midnight, Henry lifted his 
voice, not in pleading, but in command. For we 
were to start at seven the next morning, and it 
was orders. So each went to his bedroom and 
began unwrapping his bundles. In ten minutes 
Henry appeared caparisoned like a chocolate di- 
vinity! With me there was trouble. Someone 
had blundered. The shirt went on easily; the 
tunic went on cosily, but the trousers — someone 
had shuffled those trousers on me. Even a shoe 
spoon and foots-ease wouldn't get them to rise to 
their necessary height. Inspection proved that 
they were 36; now 36 doesn't do me much good 
as a waist line! There is a net deficit of eight 
tragic inches, and eight inches short in one v/aist- 
band is a catastrophe. Yet there we were. It 
was half past twelve. In six hours more we must 
be on our way to the front — to the great adven- 
ture. Uniforms were imperative. And there 
was the hiatus! Whereupon Henry rose. He 
rang for the valet; no response. He rang for 







Eight inches short in one waistband is a catastrophe 



The " Rocket's Red Glare " 69 

the tailor; he was in bed. He rang for the 
waiter; he was off duty. There was just one 
name left on the call card; so Henry hustled me 
into an overcoat and rang for the chambermaid ! 
And she appeared as innocent of English as we 
were of French. It was an awful moment! But 
Henry slowly began making gestures and talking 
in clear-ly e-nun-ci-a-ted tones. The gestures 
were the well-known gestures of his valedictory 
to the Republican party at the Chicago Audi- 
torium in 1912 — beautiful gestures and impres- 
sive. The maid became interested. Then he 
took the recalcitrant trousers, placed them gently 
but firmly against his friend's heart — or such a 
matter, showing how far from the ideal they 
came. Then he laid on the bed a brown woollen 
shirt, and in the tail of it marked out dramatically 
a " V " slice about the shape of an old-fashioned 
slice of pumpkin pie — a segment ten or a dozen 
inches wide that would require two hands in feed- 
ing. Then he pointed from the shirt to the 
trousers and then to the ample bosom of his 
friend, indicating with emotion that the huge pie- 
slice was to go into the rear corsage of the 
breeches. It was wonderful to see intelligence 
dawn in the face of that chambermaid. The ges- 
tures of that Bull Moose speech had touched her 



70 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

heart. Suddenly she knew the truth, and it made 
her free, so she cried, " Wee wee! " And oratory 
had again risen to its proper place in our midst! 
At two o'clock she returned with the pumpkin 
pie slice from the tail of the brown shirt, neatly, 
but hardly gaudily inserted into the rear waist 
line of the riding trousers, and we lay down to 
pleasant dreams; for we found that by standing 
stiffly erect, by keeping one's tunic pulled down, 
and by carefully avoiding a stooping posture, it 
was possible to conceal the facts of one's double 
life. So we went forth with Major Murphy the 
next morning as care-free as " Eden's garden 
birds." We looked like birds, too — scare- 
crows ! 

Our business took us to the American Ambu- 
lance men who were with the French army. 
Generally when they were at work they were 
quartered near a big base hospital ; and their work 
took them from the large hospital to the first 
aid stations near the front line trenches. Our 
way from Paris to these men led across the devas- 
tated area of France. As the chief activity of 
the French at the time of our visit was in the 
Verdun sector, we spent most of our first week at 
the front near Verdun. And one evening at twi- 
light we walked through the ruined city. The 



The " Rocket's Red Glare" 71 

Germans had just finished their evening strafe; 
two hundred big shells had been thrown over 
from their field guns into the ruins. After the 
two hundredth shell had dropped it was as safe 
in Verdun as in Emporia until the next day. For 
the Germans are methodical in all things, and they 
spend just so many shells on each enemy point, 
and no more. The German work of destruction 
is thorough in Verdun. Not a roof remains in- 
tact upon its walls ; not a wall remains uncracked ; 
not a soul Hves in the town ; now and then a senti- 
nel may be met patrolling the wagon road that 
winds through the streets. This wagon road, by 
the way, is the object of the German artillery's 
attention. Upon this road they think the revital- 
ment trains pass up to the front. But the senti- 
nels come and go. The only living inhabitants 
we saw in the place were two black cats. It must 
have been a beautiful city before the war — a 
town of sixty thousand and more. It contained 
some old and interesting Gothic ecclesiastical 
buildings — a cloister, a bishop's residence, a 
school — or what not — that, even crumbled and 
shattered by the shells, still show in ruins grace 
and charm and dignity. And battered as these 
mute stones were, it seemed marvellous that mere 
stone could translate so delicately the highest 



72 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

groping of men's hearts toward God, their most 
unutterable longing. And the broken stones of 
the Gothic ruin, in the freshness and rawness of 
their ruin, seemed to be bleeding out human aspi- 
ration, spilling it footlessly upon the dead earth. 
And of course all about these ecclesiastical ruins 
were the ruins of homes, and shops and stores — 
places just as pitifully appealing in their appalling 
wreck — where men had lived and loved and 
striven and failed and risen again and gone on 
slowly climbing through the weary centuries to 
the heights of grace toward which the tendrils 
of their hearts, pictured in the cloister and the 
apse and the tower, were so blindly groping. A 
dust covered chromo on a tottering wall; a little 
round-about hanging beside a broken bed, a lamp 
revealed on a table, a work bench deserted, a store 
smashed and turned to debris and left to petrify 
as the shell wrecked it — a thousand little details 
of a life that had gone, the soul vanished from a 
town, leaving it stark and dead, mere wood and 
stone and iron — this was the Verdun that we 
saw in the twilight after the Germans had finished 
their evening strafe. 

From Verdun we hurried through the night, 
past half a dozen ruined villages to a big base 
hospital. We came there in the dark before 



The " Rocket's Red Glare " 73 

moonrise, and met our ambulance men — mostly 
young college boys joyously flirting with death 
under the German guns. They were stationed 
in a tent well outside the big hospital building. 
They gave us a dinner worth while — onion soup, 
thick rare steak with peas and carrots, some sort 
of paste — perhaps macaroni or raviolli, a jelly 
omelet soused in rum, and served burning blue 
blazes, and cheese and coffee — and this from a 
camp kitchen from a French cook on five min- 
utes' notice, an hour after the regular dinner. 
The ambulance men were under the direct com- 
mand of a French lieutenant — a Frenchman 
of a quiet, gentle, serious type, who welcomed us 
beautifully, played host graciously and told us 
many interesting things about the work of the 
army around him ; and told it so simply — yet 
withal so sadly, that it impressed his face and 
manner upon us long after we had left him. 
Three or four times a day we were meeting 
French lieutenants who had charge of our am- 
bulance men at the front. But this one was dif- 
ferent. He was so gentle and so serious without 
being at all solemn. He had been in the war for 
three years, and said quite incidentally, that under 
the law of averages his time was long past due 
and he expected to go soon. It didn't seem to 



74 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

bother him. He passed the rum omelet with a 
steady hand. But his serious mien had attracted 
the ambulance boys and upon the room of his 
office in the big brick hospital they had scrawled 
in chalk, "Defense absolutement de rire!" 
" It's absolutely forbidden to laugh." Evidently 
American humour got on his nerves. As we 
dined in the tent, the boys outside sang trench 
songs, and college songs with trench words, and 
gave other demonstrations of their youth. 

So we ate and listened to the singing, while 
the moon rose, and with it came a fog — more 
than a fog — a cloud of heavy mist that hid the 
moon. We moved our baggage from the tent 
to a vacant room in a vacant ward in the big hos- 
pital. We saw in the misty moonlight a great 
brick structure running around a compound. 
The compound was over 200 feet square, and in 
the centre of the compound was a big Red Cross 
made of canvas, painted red, on a background of 
whitewashed stones. It was 100 feet square. 
On each side of the compound a Red Cross blazed 
from the roof of the buildings, under the Geneva 
lights — lights which the Germans had agreed 
should mark our hospitals and protect them from 
air raids. 



The " Rocket's Red Glare " 75 

At midnight we left the hospital to visit those 
ambulance men who were stationed at the first 
aid posts, up near the battle line. It was an eery 
sort of night ride in the ambulance, going without 
lights, up the zigzags of the hill to the battle 
front of Verdun. The white clay of the road 
was sloppy and the car wobbled and skidded along 
and we passed scores of other vehicles going up 
and coming down — with not a flicker of light 
on any of them. The Red Cross on our ambu- 
lance gave us the right of way over everything 
but ammunition trucks, so we sped forward rap- 
idly. It was revitalment time. Hundreds of 
motor trucks and horsecarts laden with munitions, 
food, men and the thousand and one supplies 
needed to keep an army going, were making their 
nightly trip to the trenches. When we reached 
a point near the top of the long hill, which we 
had been climbing, we got out of the ambulance 
and found that we were at a first aid dugout just 
back of the hill from whose top one could see the 
battle. The first aid post was a cave tunnelled 
a few yards into the hillside covered with rail- 
road iron and sandbags. In the dugout was a 
little operating room where the wounded were 
bandaged before starting them down the hill in 



76 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

the ambulance to the hospital, and three doctors 
and half a dozen stretcher bearers were standing 
inside out of the misty rain. 

As we had been climbing the hill in the ambu- 
lance, the roar of the big guns grew louder and 
louder. We believed it was French cannon. 
But when we got out of the car we heard an 
angry whistle and a roar which told us that Ger- 
man shells were coming in near us. As we stood 
before the dugout shivering in the mist we saw 
beyond us, over the hill, the glare of the French 
trench rockets lighting up the clouds above us 
weirdly, and spreading a sickly glow over the 
white muddy road before us. On the road skirt- 
ing the very door of the dugout passed a line of 
motor trucks and carts — the revitalment train. 
The mist walled us in. Every few seconds out 
of the mist came a huge grey truck or a lumber- 
ing two-wheeled cart ; and then, creaking heavily 
past the dugout door, plunged into the mist 
again. Never did the procession stop. At regu- 
lar Intervals the German shells crashed into the 
woods farther up the hill beyond us. But the 
silent procession before us — looming out of the 
mist, passing us, and fading into the mist, kept 
constantly moving. In the ghostly light of the 
misty moonshine, the procession seemed to be 



The "Rocket's Red Glare" yy 

spectral — like a line of passing souls. A doctor 
came out of the dugout and started up the hill. 
He, too, was swallowed in the mist. Ahead of 
us up the road were noises that told us the Ger- 
mans were landing bombs there, not half a mile 
— perhaps not much more than a quarter of a 
mile away. The stretcher bearers told us that 
the Germans were shelling a cross-road. They 
shelled it every night at midnight to smash the 
revitalment train. The shells were landing right 
in the road whereon all these trucks and horse 
carts were passing. The doctor who left us re- 
turned in a few minutes in an ambulance — 
wounded. Another ambulance came up with 
four or five wounded. A shell had crashed in 
and wiped out a truck load of men. But the pro- 
cession under the misty moon never stopped — 
never even hesitated. No driver spoke. No 
teams or trucks cluttered up the road. As fast 
as a bomb shattered the road out there behind the 
mist, or made debris of a truck, the engineers 
hurried up, cleared the way, removed the debris 
and the ceaseless procession in the ghostly moon- 
light moved on. Another ambulance brought in 
two more wounded. 

After one o'clock the bombing stopped. Some 
other cross-road was taking its turn. Five men 



78 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

were buried that night in the little cemetery there 
by the dugout. We stood or sat about for a 
while ! no one had much to say. The grey mist 
thickened and enveloped us. And we became as 
very shadows ourselves. Somewhere in "the mist 
up the hill, near where the rocket's red glare 
flushed on the dim horizon, a man began whistling 
the intermezzo from " Thais." It fitted the un- 
reality of the scene, and soon two of us were 
whistling together. He heard me and paused. 
Then we walked toward one another whistling 
and met. It was the Gilded Youth from the 
ship — the Gilded Youth whose many millions 
had made him shimmer. He was not shimmer- 
ing there on the sloppy hillside. He was a field 
service man, and we went back to his machine and 
sat on it and talked music — music that seemed 
to be the only reality there in the midst of death, 
and the spirit that was moving men in the moon- 
light to forget death for something more real 
than death. And so it came about that the cres- 
cendo of our talk ran thus: 

And courage — that thing which the Germans 
thought was their special gift from Heaven, bred 
of military discipline, rising out of German kid- 
tur — zve knozv nozv is the commonest heritage of 
men. It is the divine fire burning in the souls of 



The " Rocket's Red Glare " 79 

us that proves the case for democracy. For at 
base and underneath we are all equals. In crises 
the rich man, the poor man, the thief, the harlot, 
the preacher, the teacher, the labourer, the igno- 
rant, the wise, all go to death for something that 
defies death, something immortal in the human 
heart. Those truck-drivers, those mule whack- 
ers, those common soldiers, that doctor, these col- 
lege men on the ambulances are brothers tonight 
in the democracy of courage. Upon that democ- 
racy is the hope of the race, for it bespeaks a 
wider and deeper kinship of men. 

So then we knew that under the gilding of the 
Gilded Youth was fine gold. He was called for 
a wounded man. As he cranked up his car he 
asked rather too casually, " Have you seen our 
friend from the boat — the pretty nurse ? " We 
started to answer; the stretcher bearer called 
again and in an instant he went buzzing away 
and we returned to the hospital. 

We slept that night in a hospital bed. The 
week before three thousand men had passed 
through that hospital — some upon the long jour- 
ney, so we rose early the next morning. For 
some way to Henry and me there seemed a curi- 
ous disquietude about those hospital beds. 

In the early morning just after dawn we saw 



8o Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

them taking out the dead from the hospital. The 
stretcher bearers moved as quickly as they could 
with their burden through the yard. A dozen 
soldiers and orderlies were in the hospital com- 
pound, but no one turned a head toward the 
bearers and their burden. There were indeed, 
in sad deed, " a dearth of woman's nursing and a 
lack of woman's tears." No one knew who the 
dead man was. He wore his identification tag 
about him. No one cared except that it should 
be registered. If he was an officer he went to 
one part of the little graveyard just outside the 
fence ; if he was a private he went inside. It was 
a lonely, heart-breaking sight. And it occurred 
to Henry and me — we had been among the 
ghosts on the hill the night before and had slept 
uneasily wath the ghosts in the hospital — that we 
should give one poor fellow a funeral. So we 
lined up in the chill dawn, and followed the 
stretcher bearers and marched after some poor 
Frenchman to his tomb. It was probably the 
only funeral that the hospital yard ever had seen, 
for the soldiers and orderlies and attendants 
turned and gaped at the wonder, and nurses 
peered from the windows. 

Four days later we were sitting in the court- 
yard of a little tavern in St. Dizier. A young 



The "Rochet's Red Glare" 8i 

French soldier came up, and tried his EngHsh on 
us. He found that we had been to Verdun. 
And he asked, " Have you heard the news from 
the big base hospital? " We had not. Then he 
told us that the night before the German airmen 
had come to the hospital early in the night and 
had dropped their eggs — incendiary bombs. An 
hour later they came and dropped some high ex- 
plosives. They came again at midnight and be- 
cause there were no anti-aircraft guns near by — 
the allies until those August and September Ger- 
man raids never had dreamed that hospitals would 
be raided — they came again swooping low and 
turned their machine guns on the doctors and the 
nurses in the compound who were taking the 
wounded out of the burning building. Then to- 
ward morning they came and dropped handbills 
which declared, " li you don't want your hos- 
pitals bombed, move them back further from the 
front!" 

The Germans were not acting in the heat of 
passion. They were fighting scientifically, even 
if barbarously. For every mile a hospital is 
moved back of the line makes it that much harder 
to stop gangrene in the wounded. And by check- 
ing gangrene we are saving a great majority of 
our wounded to return to battle. 



82 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

Nine doctors and fifteen nurses and many 
wounded were killed that night at Vlaincourt. 
" And the French officer de liason between the 
French army and the American ambulance, what 
of him? " we asked. 

" He slept in the hospital and was killed by a 
bomb," answered the Frenchman. 

So our serious faced French lieutenant knew 
all too well why " It is absolutely forbidden to 
laugh " in war ! 



CHAPTER III 

IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER BOMBS BURSTING 

IN AIR 

THERE is something, though Heaven knows 
not much, to be said for war as war. And 
the little to be said is said when one declares that 
it refreshes life by taking us out of our ruts. 
Routine kills men and nations and races ; it is stag- 
nation. But war shakes up society, puts men into 
strange environments, gives them new diversions, 
new aims, changed ideals. In the faint breath of 
war that came to Henry and me, as we went 
about our daily task inspecting hospitals and first 
aid posts and ambulance units for the Red Cross, 
there was a tremendous whiff of the big change 
that must come to lives that really get into war as 
soldiers. Even we were for ever pinching our- 
selves to see if we were dreaming, as we rode 
through the strange land, filled with warlike im- 
pedimenta, and devoted exclusively to the science 
of slaughter. By rights we should have been sit- 
ting in our offices in Wichita and Emporia edit- 

83 



84 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

ing two country newspapers, wrangling mildly 
with the pirates of the paper mills to whom our 
miserable little forty or fifty carloads of white 
paper a year was a trifle, dickering with foreign 
advertisers who desired to spread before Wichita 
and Emporia the virtues of their chewing gum 
or talking machines, or discussing the ever chang- 
ing Situation with the local statesmen. At five 
o'clock Henry should be on his way to the Wichita 
golf course to reduce his figure, and the sullen roar 
of the muffler cut-out on the family car should be 
warning me that we were going to picnic that 
night out on the Osage hills in the sunset, where 
it would be up to me to eat gluten bread and avoid 
sugars, starches and fats to preserve the girlish 
lines of my figure. 

But instead, here we were puffing up a hill in 
France, through underbrush, across shell holes to 
a hidden trench choked with telephone cables that 
should lead underground to an observation post 
where a part of the staff of the French army sat 
overlooking the battle of the Champagne. As we 
puffed and huffed up the hill, we recalled to each 
other that we had been in our offices but a few 
weeks before when the Associated Press report 
had brought us the news of the Champagne drive 
for hill 208. Among other things the report had 



" Bombs Bursting in Air " 85 

declared " a number of French soldiers were or- 
dered into their own barrage, and several were 
shot for refusing to go into action thereafter! " 
And now here we were looking through a peep- 
hole in the camouflage at the battlefield! We 
were half way up the hill ; below us lay a weedy 
piece of bottom land, all kneaded and pock- 
marked by shells, stretching away to another 
range of hills perhaps five miles, perhaps ten 
miles away, as the valley widened or narrowed. 
The white clay of the soil erupting under shell 
fire glimmered nakedly and indecently through 
the weeds. It was hard to realize that three years 
before the valley before us had been one of the 
great fertile valleys of France, dotted with little 
grey towns with glowing red roofs. For as we 
looked it seemed to be " that ominous tract, which 
all agree hides the Dark Tower ! " There it all 
lay ; the " ragged thistle stalk," with its head 
chopped off ; " the dock's harsh swart leaves 
bruised as to balk all hope of greenness." " As 
for the grass, it grew scantier than hair in lep- 
rosy; thin dry leaves pricked the mud, which un- 
derneath looked kneaded up with blood ! " It 
was the self-same field that Roland crossed! In 
the midst of the waste zigzagged two lines — two 
white gashes in the soil, with a scab of horrible 



86 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

brown rust scratched between them — the French 
and German trenches and the barbed wire en- 
tanglements. At some places the trenches ran close 
together, a few hundred feet or a few hundred 
yards marked their distance apart. At other times 
they backed fearfully away from one another with 
the gashed, stark, weed-smeared earth gaping be- 
tween them. We paused to rest in our climb at a 
little shrine by the wayside. A communication 
trench slipped deviously up to it, and through this 
trench were brought the wounded ; for the shrine, 
a dugout in the hillside, had been converted into a 
first aid station. A doctor and two stretcher bear- 
ers and two ambulance men were waiting there. 
Yet the little shrine, rather than the trenches that 
crept up to it, dominated the scene and the war 
seemed far away. Occasionally we heard a dis- 
tant boom and saw a tall cone of dirt rise in the 
bottom land among the trenches, and we felt that 
some poor creature might be in his death agony. 
But that was remote, too, and Major Murphy of 
our party climbed to the roof of the dugout and 
began turning his glasses toward the German lines. 
Then the trenches about us suddenly grew alive. 
The Frenchmen were waving their hands and run- 
ning about excitedly. Major Murphy was a Ma- 
jor — a regular United States Army major in a 




One of our party climbed to the roof of the dugout and 
began turning his glasses toward the German lines 



" Bombs Bursting in Air " 89 

regular United States army uniform so grand that 
compared with our cheap cotton khaki it looked 
like a five thousand dollar outfit. The highest offi- 
cer near us was a French second-lieutenant, who 
had no right to boss a Major ! But something had 
to be done. So the second lieutenant did it. He 
called down the Major; showed him that he was 
in direct range of the German guns, and made it 
clear that a big six-foot American in uniform 
standing silhouetted against the sky-line would 
bring down a whole wagon-load of German hard- 
ware on our part of the line. The fact that the 
German trenches were two miles away did not 
make the situation any less dangerous. After- 
wards we left the shrine and the trenches and 
went on up the hill. 

The view from the observation trench on the 
hill-top, when we finally got there, was a won- 
derful view, sweeping the whole Champagne bat- 
tle field. Hill 208 lay in the distance, still in Ger- 
man hands, and before it, wallowing in the white 
earth were a number of English tanks abandoned 
by the French. Lying out there in No Man's 
Land between the trenches, the tanks looked to our 
Kansas eyes like worn out threshing machines 
and spelled more clearly than anything else in the 
landscape the extent of the French failure in the 



90 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

Champagne drive of the spring of 19 17. It may 
be profitable to know just how far the pendulum 
of war had swung toward failure in France last 
spring, before America declared war. To begin: 
The French morale went bad ! We heard here 
in America that France was bled white. The 
French commission told us how sorely France 
needed the American war declaration. But to 
say that the morale of a nation has gone bad 
means so much. It is always a struggle even in 
peace, even in prosperity, for the honest, cour- 
ageous leadership of a nation to keep any Nation 
honest. But when hope begins to sag, when the 
forces of disorder and darkness that lie subdued 
and dormant in every nation, and in every human 
heart are bidden by evil times to rise — they rise. 
Leadership fails in its battle against them. For a 
year after the morale of the French began to come 
back strong, the French newspapers and French 
government were busy exposing and punishing 
the creatures who shamed France in the spring 
of 19 1 7. German money has been traced 
to persons high in authority. A network of 
German spies was uncovered, working with 
the mistresess of men high in government — 
the kaiser is not above using the thief and the 
harlot for his aims; money literally by the 



" Bomhs Bursting in Air" 91 

cartload was poured into certain departments 
to hinder the work of the army, and the tragic 
disaster of the Champagne drive was the result 
partly of intrigue in Paris in the government, 
partly of poverty, partly the result of three win- 
ters of terrible suffering in the nation, and partly 
the weakening under the strain of all these things, 
of this " too too solid flesh and blood." During 
the winter of 1916-17 soldiers at the front re- 
ceived letters from home telling of starvation and 
freezing and sickness in their families. And 
trench conditions in the long hard winter were all 
but unbearable. 'When a soldier finally got a 
leave of absence and started home, he found the 
railroad system breaking down and he had long 
waits at junction points with no sleeping quarters, 
no food, no shelter. French soldiers going home 
on leave would lie all night and all day out in the 
open, drenched by the rain and stained by the 
mud, and would reach home bringing to their 
families trench vermin and trench fever and 
trench misery untold, to add to the woe that the 
winter had brought to the home while the soldier 
was away. Then when he went back to fight, 
he found that a bureaucratic clash had left the 
soldiers without supplies, or food or ammunition 
in sufficient quantities to supply the battle needs. 



92 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

In the bureaucratic clash some one lost his head 
in the army and ordered the men into their own 
barrage. Hundreds were slaughtered. Thou- 
sands were verging on mutiny. A, regiment re- 
fused to fight, and another threatened to disobey. 
The American ambulance boys told us that the 
most horrible task they did was when they hauled 
eighty poor French boys out to be shot for 
mutiny! Spies in Paris, working through the 
mistresses of the department heads, the sad strain 
of war upon the French economic resources, and 
the withering hand of winter upon the heart of 
France had achieved all but a victory for the 
forces of evil in this earth. 

And there we were that summer day, Mrhen 
time and events had changed the face of fate, 
looking out across the blighted field of Champagne 
at what might have been the wreck of France. 

All is changed now. At every railroad junc- 
tion the American Red Cross has built canton- 
ments, where beds and food and baths and disin-_ 
fecting ovens for trench clothes are installed for 
the homeward bound soldiers of France. The 
American Red Cross has the name of every 
French soldier's family that is in need, and that 
family's needs are being supplied by the Ameri- 
can Red Cross. And the sure hope of victory 



"Bombs Bursting in Air" 93 

has given the leadership of France a mastery of 
the forces of evil in the lower levels of the Na- 
tion's political consciousness that will make it 
impossible for the kaiser's friends, the courtesans, 
to accomplish anything next winter. 

We gazed across the field that afternoon and 
seeing the blotched acres, weed blasted, shell- 
pocked, blistered with white trenches and scarred 
with long jagged barbed-wire rents for miles and 
miles, and we thought how perfectly does the 
spirit of man mark the picture of his soul's agony 
upon his daily work. 

It was late in the afternoon when we left that 
sector of the line. We passed a bombed hospital ^ 
where two doctors and three nurses had been 
killed a night or two before. It was a disquietingX 
sight, and the big Red Cross on the top of the \ 
hospital showed that the German airmen who \ 
dropped the bombs were careful in their aim. j 
Gradually as we left the Champagne front the 
booming guns grew fainter and fainter and finally 
we could not hear them, and we came into a wide, 
beautiful plain and then turned into the city of 
Rheims. It was bombed to death — but not to \ 
ruins. Rheims is what Verdun must have been s 
during the first year of the war, a phantom city, 
desolate, all but uninhabited, broken and battered 



94 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

and abandoned. Here and there, living in caves 
and cellars, a few citizens still stick to their 
homes. A few stores remain open and an occa- 
sional trickle of commerce flows down the streets. 
We went to the cathedral and found its outlines 
there — a veritable Miss Havisham of a ruin, the 
pale spectre of its former beauty, but proud and 
— if stone and iron can be conscious — vain of 
its lost glory. A gash probably ten feet square 
has been gouged in the pavement by a German 
shell, and the hole uncovers a hidden passage to 
the Cathedral of which no one in this generation 
knew. In the hovering twilight we walked about, 
gazing in a sadness that the broken splendour of 
the place cast upon us, at the details of the devas- 
tation. The roof, of course, is but a film of wood 
and iron rent with big holes. The walls are in- 
tact, but cracked and broken and tottering. The 
Gothic spires and gargoyles and ornaments are 
shattered beyond restoration, and the windows 
are but staring blind eyes where once the soul of 
the church gazed forth. Men come and gather 
the broken bits of glass as art treasures. 

That evening at supper in Chalons, we met 
some American boys who said the French were 
selling this glass from the windows of Rheims 
made from old beer-bottles and blue bottles and 



"Bombs Bursting in Air" 95 

green bitters bottles, and still later we saw an 
English Colonel who had bought a job lot of it 
and found a patent medicine trade mark blown in 
a piece ! 

We had been in the place but a few minutes, 
when we went to the back of the cathedral where 
we found an excited old man on the sidewalk with 
a broom in front of a postcard printing office. 
He spoke to Henry and me, but we could not 
understand him. He pointed to the stone dust 
and spawl freshly dropped on the sidewalk and 
to a hole in the pavement, and then to a broken 
iron shell. It must have weighed twenty-five 
pounds. He kept pointing at it, and made it 
clear we were to touch it. It was still hot! It 
had dropped in but a few minutes before we came. 
We went into his shop to stock up on post cards, 
and as Major Murphy and Mr. Norton, who could 
talk French, learned that another shell would be 
due in three or four minutes, we left town. 

The road out of Rheims was in full view of the 
German lines, hidden only, and at that rather 
poorly, by camouflage — straw woven into mats, 
and burlap, badly torn. We were between the 
German guns five miles away, and the sunset. 
Great holes in the ground beside the road indi- 
cated where they had been dropping shells, so our 



96 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

driver tramped on the juice, the machine shot 
out at fifty miles an hour and we skedaddled. 

From the road out of Rheims we dropped into 
the valley of the Marne, a most beautiful vine- 
clad valley, where the road turns sharply from the 
German lines and soon passes out of the German 
range and the shell holes at the side of the road 
disappear. But even shell holes would not have 
taken our eyes from the beauty of that valley as 
we wound down into it from the hill. Vines 
were everywhere. Rows and rows of vines, 
marking a thousand brownish green lines in the 
earth as far as the eye could see. The grapes 
were ripe and they gave a tint of purple and 
brown to the landscape. It glowed with colour. 
Half a score of little grey, red roofed towns 
dotted the checkered fields. The sun was slant- 
ing through the plain. Tall dark poplars slashed 
it with sombre greens. As we whizzed through 
the quaint little villages dashes of colour seemed 
doused in our faces ; soldiers in horizon blue with 
crimson trimmings and gold on their uniforms, 
black Moroccans with their gaudy red fezes, 
flags of staff and line officers fluttering from 
doors and window sills, all refreshed our eyes 
with new, strange, gorgeous combinations of col- 
ours. And when we passed a town where no 



"Bombs Bursting in Air" 97 

soldiers were quartered, there the dooryards were 
brilHant with phlox and dahlias — even the door 
yards of those poor wrecked villages deserted 
after the German bombardment — villages roof- 
less and grey and gaunt and wan, from which 
the population fled in July, 19 14, and from which 
the Germans themselves a few weeks later were 
forced to flee, running pell-mell as they scurriea^.^ 
before the wrath of the French soldiers. 

As we went down into the valley of the Marne 
where division after division of the French army 
was quartered upon the population, thousands in 
a village, where normally hundreds were shel- 
tered, we realized what social chaos must stalk in 
the train of war. Every few weeks these sol- 
diers go to the front and other soldiers come in. 
Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times 
are at the front or dead. The visiting soldiers 
come " from over the hills and far away," but 
they are young, and the women are young and 
beautiful, and they live daily with these women 
in their houses. Moreover, the emotions of 
France are tense. Death, doubt, fear and hope 
lash the home-staying hearts every day. And 
amid those raw emotions comes the daily and 
hourly call of the deepest emotion in the human 
heart. It comes honestly. It comes inevitably. 



98 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

And then, in a day or an hour, the lover is gone, 
and new faces appear in the village, in the street, 
in the home. Five millions of men during the 
last three years and a half have passed and re- 
passed, through those fifty miles or so back of the 
firing line in which soldiers are quartered for 
rest, where in times of peace less than a million 
men have lived. And the women are the same 
honest, earnest, aspiring women that our wives 
and sisters are, and the men are as chivalrous and 
gentle and as kind. 

For nearly an hour we had been going through 
these villages crowded with soldiers — kindly 
French soldiers who were clearly living happily 
with the people upon whom they were billeted. 
Then Henry burst forth, " My good Heavens, 
man — what if this were in Wichita or Emporia ! 
What if your house and mine had ten or twenty 
fine soldiers in it, and we were away and our 
wives and daughters were there alone? Thou- 
sands and thousands of these young girls flitting 
about here were just little children three years 
ago when their daddies left. What if in our 
streets soldiers were quartered by the hundreds 
in every block, with nothing in the world to do 
but rest! What would happen in Wichita and 
Emporia — or back East in Goshen, New York, 



" Bombs Bursting in Air " 99 

or out West in Fresno or Tonapah? What an 
awful thing — what a hell in the earth, war is ! " 
And yet we know that young hearts will ex- 
press themselves as they were meant to express 
themselves even in the wrack and ruin and waste 
of war. And this strange picture of love and 
death sitting together some way reminded us of 
the phlox and the dahlias blooming in the dreary 
dooryards of the shattered homes near the battle 
line. And then our hearts turned to the youth 
on the boat — that precious load of mounting 
young blood that came over with us on the 
Espagne where we were the oldest people in the 
ship's company- And we began talking of the. 
Eager Soul and her Young Doctor and the Gilded 
Youth. If the war could lash our old hearts as 
it was lashing them, so that even our emotions 
were raw and more or less a-quiver in the storm 
of the mingled passions of the world that over- 
whelmed us, how much — how fearfully much 
more must their younger hearts be stirred ? How 
could youth come out of it all unscarred! And 
she was such a sweet pretty girl, the Eager Soul, 
so fine and brave and wise — yet her heart was 
a girl's heart, after all. And the Young Doctor, 
his keen sensitive face showed how near to the 
surface was the quick in him. As for the Gilded 



/ 



/ 

"oo Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 



Youth, we had seen there on the hill in the misty 
night the great hammer of the guns pound the 
dross out of him ! And here they were all three 
alone, in the fury of this awful storm that was 
testing the stoutest souls in the world, and they 
were so young and so untried! 

The roads over which we had been travelling 
for two days in our car were military roads. 
And we could tell instantly when we were inside 
the thirty kilo limit of the firing line, by looking 
at the road menders. If they were German pris- 
oners we were outside the thirty kilo strip. For 
when the Germans discovered last spring that the 
Allies held more prisoners than the Germans, the 
Germans demanded a rule for the treatment of 
prisoners, which should keep them thirty kilos 
from danger. It was a rule that the Allies had 
been observing; but the Germans were not ob- 
serving it, until they found that they might suffer 
by non-observance. So when we left the German 
prisoners and came to French road menders — 
generally French Chinamen or Anamites, or 
negroes from Dahomey or other oriental peo- 
ples, we knew we were soon to come in sound of 
the big guns. These road menders always were 
at work. Beside every road a few yards apart, 
always were little neatly stacked cones of road 



"Bombs Bursting in Air" loi 

metal. A road roller always was in sight. No 
road ever got bumpy and at given distances along 
the road were repair stations for the government 
automobiles. Nothing was allowed to stop the 
machinery of war. At night along these coun- 
try roads, thirty kilos back from the line we trav- 
elled with lights; so that night out of Rheims, we 
hurried through the night, passed village after 
village swarming with soldiers, black and yellow 
and white ; for the colour line does not irritate the 
French; and we saw how gay and happy they 
were, crowding into picture shows, listening to the 
regimental band, sitting on the sidewalks before 
the cafes, or dancing with the girls in the parks. 
Then a time came when the village streets were 
lonely and dark and we knew that the bugle had 
sounded taps. And so in due course we came to 
the end of the day's journey, at the end of a 
spur of the railroad, near one sector of the Ver- 
dun front. There we found a field hospital of 
four thousand beds. And when there is to be 
renewed French activity on the Verdun sector, 
the first thing that happens is the general evacu- 
ation of all the patients in the hospital. It takes 
a great many railroad trains to clear out a hos- 
pital wherein six thousand wounded men are 
jammed. We saw one hospital train loading. 



I02 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

This hospital had handled twenty-six hundred 
cases in one day the week before we arrived. 
The big guns that we had heard booming away 
for three days as we went up and down the line 
had been grinding their awful grist. We walked 
through the hospital, which covered acres of 
ground. It is a board structure, some of the 
walls are not even papered, but show the two-by- 
fours nakedly and the rafters above. Stoves 
heat most of the wards, and hospital linoleum 
covers the runways between the rows of beds. 
Of course, the operating rooms are painted white 
and kept spotless. The French are marvellous 
surgeons, and their results in turning men back 
to the line, both in per cent of men and time are 
up to the normal average of the war; but they / 
are not so finical about flies and fresh air and ^ 
unimportant dirt as the English or the Americans. 
They probably feel that there are more essential 
things to consider than flies and their trysting 
places ! In this hospital we saw our first wounded 
German prisoners. We saw boys fifteen years 
old, whose voices had not changed. We saw 
men past fifty. We saw slope-shouldered, hol-\ 
low-chested, pale-faced men of the academic type, \ 
wearing glasses an eighth of an inch thick. We 
saw scrubby looking men who seemed to " be the 



" Bombs Bursting in Air " 103 

dirt and the dross, the dust and the scum of the 
earth." 

And we saw also some well-set-up Germans, 
and in a bull-pen near the railroad station waiting 
for the trains to take them to the interior of 
France were six thousand German prisoners — 
for the most part well-made men. Here and 
there was a scrub — a boy, a defective, or an old 
man; showing that the Germans are working 
these classes through the army ; but indicating, 
so far as one batch of prisoners from one part of 
the battle line may indicate, that the Germans 
still have a splendid fighting army. But the old 
German army that came raging through Belgium 
and northern France in 19 14 is gone. Germany 
is well past the peak in man power, as shown in 
the soldiers of the line. It is also likely that the 
morale of the German line has its best days be- 
hind it. The American ambulance men in the 
Verdun sector told us of a company of German 
soldiers who had come across a few nights before 
to surrender, after killing their officers. They 
appeared at about ten o'clock at night, and told 
the French to cease firing at exactly that time the 
next night for ten minutes and another troop of 
Germans would come across. The French 
ceased at the agreed hour and thirty more came 



1 



104 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

over and brought the mail to their comrades ! 
That, of course, is not a usual occurrence. But 
similar instances are found. The best one can 
say of the German morale in the army is that it is 
spotted. In civilian life the nearer one gets to 
Germany the surer one is that the civilian morale 
seems to be sound. These things we found in 
the air up near the front line trenches, where 
German prisoners talk, and where one sees the' 
war " close up." 

But we were going still nearer to the German 
lines, and the next day we set out for Recicourt 
and arrived there about noon. It is a little 
bombed village where a few thousand soldiers are 
quartered, and a few score villagers huddle in 
cellars and caves by night and go forth to their 
farms by day. The village lies in a ravine. The 
railway runs in front of the town, and the week 
we were there a big naval gim was booming away 
on the railroad throwing death into the German 
lines eight or ten miles away. At the back of 
the town, across a bridge over a brook the white 
wagon road runs, and that day the road was 
black with trucks going up to the front line with 
supplies. We could hear the big guns plainly 
over in the woods a few miles away. But we 
had no thought of danger as we tumbled out of 



" Bombs Bursting in Air " 105 

our car. We should have known that bombed 
villages don't just grow that way! Something 
causes the gapin^^ligles in roofs, the shattered 
walls, the blear-eyed windows and battered out- 
buildings! Generally it is German shells; but 
we had been seeing bombed towns for days, and 
we forgot that sooner or later we must meet the 
bombs that did the miserable work. As we stood 
by the automobiles at Recicourt, kicking the 
wrinkles out of our cotton khaki riding breeches 

— and mine, alas, had to be kicked carefully to 
preserve that pie-slice cut from my shirt tail that 
expanded the waistband from 36 to 44 inches — 
little did it seem to Henry and me that we should 
first meet a German shell face to face in a place 
like Recicourt. The name did not sound historic. 
But we had scarcely shaken hands around the 
group of American Ambulance men who gathered 
to greet us before we heard a B-A-N-G ! — an 
awful sound! It was as if someone suddenly 
had picked up the whole Haynes Hardware store 

— at Emporia — tinware, farm implements, 
stoves, nails and shelf-goods, and had switched it 
with an awful whizz through the air and landed 
it upon the sheet-iron roof of Wichita's Civic 
Forum, which seats six thousand! We looked 
at each other in surprise, but each realized that he 



io6 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

must be casual to support the other; so we said 
nothing to the Ambulance boys, and they, being 
used to such things, let it pass also. We went on 
talking; so did Major Murphy, being a soldier. ^ 
So did Mr. Richard Norton, being head of the 
American Ambulance Service. In a minute there 
was a fearful whistle — long, piercing, and sav- 
age, and then they had taken the Peters Hard- 
ware stock in Emporia and dumped it on the 
Wichita Union Station. This time we saw a 
great cone-shaped cloud of dirt rise not 400 feet 
away — over by the wagon road, across the brook 
from us. Still no one mentioned the matter. It 
seemed to Henry and me to be anything but a 
secret, but if the others had that notion of it, 
far be it from us to blab ! An ambulance driver 
came lazying around the corner and began to start 
his car. 

" Any one hurt, Singer ? " asked a handsome 
youth named Hughes, of the Corps. 

" Man hit by the first shell up here by the rail- 
road. I'm going after him." 

" Hurt badly ? " asked another boy. 

" Oh, arm or shoulder or something blown off. - 
I'll be back for lunch." 

The details interested us ; we could see that the 
secret was being uncovered. Again came an 



''Bombs Bursting in Air" 107 

awful roar and another terrific bang — this time 
the dust cloud rose nearer to us than before — 
perhaps 300 feet away. Every one ducked. In 
five seconds they had taught me to duck. It's 
curious how quickly the adult mind acquires use- 
ful information. But Henry for some reason 
got a bad start, and his duck needed correction. 
To duck, you scrooch down, and shrink in, to get 
as much as possible of your body under the eaves 
of your steel helmet. Somewhere between the 
second and third bang, they got a helmet on me. 
No one knows where it came from, nor how it 
got there. But there it was, while they were cor- 
recting Henry's duck. In spite of them, when he 
ducked, Henry would lean forward, thus multi- 
plying his exposure by ten. But it really does a 
fat man little good to duck anyway ; the eaves of 
his helmet hardly cover his collar. It was while 
they were trying to telescope Henry that some 
one grabbed me by the arm and said : 
"Come on! Let's go to the abri ! " 
Abri was a brand new word to me, but it 
seemed to be some place to go and that was 
enough for me. 

" Where " (read this line with feeling and em- 
phasis) " is the abri? " The ambulance boy took 
me by the arm and led me on a trot to a dugout 



io8 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

covered with railroad iron, and logs and sand 
bags, and we went in there and found it full of 
French officers. They have some sense. The 
abri would not turn a direct explosion of a shell ; 
but it would shield one against a glancing blow 
and against the shrapnel which sprays itself out 
from the point where the shell hits like a molten 
iron fountain. After the ninth bomb had come 
over we left the abri. The Germans had been 
allowancing Recicourt to nine a day. But that 
day they gave us three more prunes for dessert. 
They came very close and fairly fast together. 
As they came Henry was sitting in the barn where 
the ambulance boys had their meals. Lunch was 
on the table and Henry was writing. The shells 
sounded just outside the barn. " What are you 
writing, Mr. Allen?" asked Major Murphy. 
" I'm sketching," stuttered the Wichita states- 
man, " a sort of a draft of the American terms of 
peace ! " 

After three extra bombs had come in the Ger- 
mans turned their guns from the town, and we 
had our lunch at our ease. And such a lunch! 
A melon to begin with ; a yellow melon that looks 
like the old-fashioned American muskmelon and 
tastes like a nectar of the gods, followed by onion 
soup. Then followed an entree, a large thin slice 




" Come on ! Let's go to the abri ! 



"Bombs Bursting in Air" ill 

of cold sausage which they afterward told us was 
made of horse meat, a pate of some kind, then 
roast veal sliced thin and slightly underdone with 
browned potatoes ; then new beans served as a 
separate course ; then fruit and cheese and coffee 
and cigars ! And that in a barn ! 

We had to go up to a first aid station after 
lunch so we piled into an ambulance, were but- 
toned in from the back by the driver, and went 
sailing up the hill and into the woods. They 
told us that we were in the Avecourt Woods in 
the Forest of Hess. We remembered that but a 
few weeks before when we were in our newspaper 
ofifices, that the Avecourt Woods had been the 
scene of some fierce and bloody fighting. And 
as we rode up the hill we heard the French can- 
non roaring all about us. We were told that 
four thousand cannon were planted in the Ave- 
court Woods, but only about a thousand of them 
were active that day. Yet we could see none, so 
completely were they hidden by camouflage. 
The woods were barren of leaves or branches 
though they should have been in foliage. We 
gazed through the windows of the ambulance into 
the stark forest with its top off, and then rather 
gradually it occurred to me that the white ob- 
jects carefully corded against the tree trunks were 



112 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

not sticks of cord wood at all, as they seemed, and 
as they should have been if the wood had been 
under the ax instead of under fire. They were 
French seventy-five shells — deadly brass car- 
tridges two feet long, all nicely and peacefully: 
corded against the trunks of the big trees! We 
rode through them for several miles. Beside the 
road always were the little heaps of road metal, 
little heaps of stone, and always the engineers 
stood ready to refill the holes that might be made 
by the incoming shells. And occasionally they 
were coming in; though they seemed to be land- 
ing in a distant part of the forest. The ear be- 
comes curiously quick at telling the difference be- 
tween what are known as arrives and departs. 
The departs were going out that day at the ratio 
of 32 to one arrive. For the Germans had wasted 
enough ammunition on the Verdun sector and 
were trying to economize ! Still the arrives were 
landing in the Avecourt wood every minute or 
so, and they were disquieting. Only the chirping 
of our own broad-mouthed canaries there in the 
roofless forest gave us cheer. For some way the 
sound of the shells of our own guns shrieking 
over us is a deep comfort; it is something like 
the consolation of a great faith. 

At last, seven or eight miles in the forest, we 



"Bombs Bursting in Air" 113 

came upon the first aid post, a quarter of a mile 
from the opposite edge of the wood and but half 
a mile from the front line trenches of Verdun. 
The first aid post there was a cellar, half exca- 
vated, and half covered with earth, and roofed 
with iron rails, logs and sandbags. The usual 
French doctors, stretcher bearers and American 
Ambulance men were there. And there was the 
little cemetery, always found at a first aid post 
where those are buried who die on the stretchers 
or in the dugout. It was lovingly adorned by the 
French with the tri-colour of France, with bronze 
wreaths, with woodland flowers, and was alto- 
gether bright and beautiful in the bare woods. 
They showed us a shell by the cave — a gas shell 
that had come over during the morning and had 
hit on the oblique and had not exploded. It was 
gently leaking chlorine gas, which we sniffed — 
but gingerly. Other shells were popping into 
the place and fairly near us with some regularity 
and enthusiasm, and it seemed to Henry and me 
that we had no desire to stare grim war's 
wrinkled front out of countenance, and we hoped 
that the Major and Mr. Norton were nearly ready 
to go back. But we heard this : 

From the Major : " How far forward can we 
go toward Hill 304 ; we would like to see it, but 



114 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

have no desire to go further than you care to 
have us." 

And from the French Heutenant in charge : 
" Go to Berlin if you want to! " 

It occurred to Henry and me, considering our 
feelings, that the Major's nonchalant use of that 
" we " was without the consent of the governed. 
But when he started forward we followed. Our 
moral cowardice overwhelmed our physical cow- 
ardice, and our legs tracked ahead while our 
hearts tracked back. The Major swung along 
the road at a fast clip ; Mr. Norton went with him. 
For short-geared men we followed as fast as we 
could, but it was at a respectful distance. Nearer 
and nearer we came to the open field, and by the 
same token, quicker and nearer and hotter came 
the German shells. We were continually on the 
duck. Our progress had an accordion rhythm 
that made distance come slow. We came to a 
dead mule in the road. He had been bombed re- 
cently, and was not ready for visitors. Now a 
mule is not nature's masterpiece at his best; but 
in the transition state between a mule and ham- 
burger, a mule leaves much to be desired. As 
we passed the forward reaches of the mule, Henry 
began his kidding. He always begins to guy a 
situation under emotion. " Bill," he cried, " if 



" Bombs Bursting in Air " 115 

we die we'll at least save our nice new hundred 
dollar uniforms down there in Paris!" And 
from me he got this : " And say, Henry — if 
we die we won't have to face our wives and tell 
'em we paid that much for a two-piece suit'! 
There's that comfort in sudden death ! " 

It seemed to Henry and me that we had seen 
all there was to be seen of the war. Hill 304 
would be there after the treaty of peace was 
signed and the Major and Norton then could 
come to see it. But they were bound for Berlin ; 
so we slowly edged by that poor mule ; he seemed 
to be the longest mule we had ever — well, he 
seemed to be a sort of trans-continental mule, but 
we finally got past him and came to the edge of 
the woods. It took about three ducks to twenty 
yards, and passing the mule we had four downs 
and no gain. That gave the Germans the ball. 
So when we got to the edge of the wood and 
were standing looking into the French trenches 
and at Hill 304 off at our right, after the Major 
had handed Norton the field glasses and Norton 
had considerately handed them to Henry, who 
passed them to me for such fleeting glance as po- 
liteness might require, the Germans came back 
with that ball. It came right out of Berlin, too. 
One could hear it howl as it crossed the Thier- 



ii6 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

garten and went over Wilhelm Strasse and 
scream as it whizzed over Bavaria. There never 
was another such shell. And we ducked — 
all of us. Henry said he never saw me make 
such a duck — it was the duck of a life-time. 
And then that shell landed. It was a wholesale 
hardware store that hit — no retail affair. The 
sound was awful. And then something inside of 
me or outside tore with an awful rip. We had 
been reading Dr. Crile's book on the anesthesia 
of fear, and suddenly it occurred to me that the 
shell had hit me and torn a hole in me and that 
fear had deadened the pain. Slowly and in ter- 
ror my right hand groped back to the place of the 
wound, expecting every moment to encounter 
blood and ragged flesh. We were still crouched 
over, waiting for the fountain of junk to cease 
spraying. Nearer and nearer came the shrink- 
ing fingers to the wound. They felt no blood, 
but something more terrible! There, dangling 
by its apex, hung that pie-shaped slice of shirt 
from those cotton khaki trousers — ripped clear 
out! And Paris fifty miles away! 

Slowly we unfolded ourselves from the duck. 
And as we came up — sping ! went a sharp me- 
tallic click on Norton's helmet. A bit of shrap- 
nel had hit it. Under a hat he would have been 



"Bombs Bursting in Air" 117 

killed ! So we went back to the first aid post — 
me holding those khaki trousers up by sheer force 
of will, and both hands! 

So long as Norton and the Major had led the 
way from the dugout, it simultaneously flashed 
over Henry and me that we should lead the way 
back, and not leave all the exertion to our com- 
panions. So we set the pace back. 

At the first aid post we stopped for breath. 
The French welcomed us back, and we rested a 
moment under their hospitality. Our own 
French guns were carolling away; the arrives 
were coming in. It seemed to Henry and me 
that we were not so badly frightened as we knew 
we were. For we kept a running fire going of 
airy persiflage — which was like the noise of 
boys whistling through a graveyard. Henry 
said : " That German gunner is playing by ear ! 
His time is bad, or else it's syncopated." Then 
to Major Murphy: "Nice sightly location that 
Hill 304; but I noticed real estate going up a 
good deal in the neighbourhood ! " And to the 
assembled company in the dugout he remarked 
as he pulled out his pipe, a short Hiram Johnson, 
bulldog model that he had bought on the Rue de 
Rivoli, " If you gentlemen will get out your gas 
masks now I'll light my dreadnaught! " Which 



ii8 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

he did and calmed his iron nerves. So in a few 
moments we came out of the post and went to our 
ambulance which would take us back to Recicourt, 
Clouds had blown across the sky and as we passed 
the gay little cemetery by the dugout, we were 
shocked to see the body of a French lieutenant 
laid ready for burial. He had met death while 
we played the fool in our twenty minutes' walk. 

We rode to Recicourt greatly sobered, and it 
was hours before we could get back our spirit. 
Of course, eventually, kind hands pinned up the 
rent in the corsage of those khaki trousers. They 
used a dozen big steel safety pins as large as rail- 
way spikes. And that night as we were prepar- 
ing for bed in a shack near a hospital, Henry 
gazed curiously at the joiS'as it glittered before 
him in our corner, when, his friend's tunic being 
removed, the wealth of metal was uncovered. 
Henry was impressed. " Bill," he said gently, as 
he gazed admiringly at his friend's armour, " I 
don't know as I ever saw a man before with so 
much open plumbing on him as you're wearing 
these days ! " 

For a long time we lay awake and talked about 
the day's experience, and particularly our half 
day under fire. We agreed that really it was not 
so bad. We were scared — badly scared ; but we 




So we went back — me holding those khaki trousers 
up by sheer force of will and both hands ! 



"Bombs Bursting in Air" 121 

could laugh at it, even at the hottest of it, and 
it was never so exceedingly hot. Yet we might 
have been killed. Thousands who died, went out 
in just such mild places as we had been through, 
and probably went out laughing as we might have 
gone, by a jiggle of a quarter of an inch one way 
or another of the German's gun. Our Wichita 
and Emporia soldiers, we said, would doubtless 
live days and weeks under what we had seen and 
would grow fat on it. Then Henry mused : " I 
wonder if that young French lieutenant there in 
the woods went out smiling! " And then for a 
long time no one spoke, and at last we slept. 



CHAPTER IV 

WHEREIN WE FIND THAT " OUR FLAG IS 
STILL THERE " 

THIS chapter will contain the story of our 
visit to General Pershing and the Ameri- 
can troops. But before we came to that part of 
France which holds our men we passed through 
divers warlike and sentimental enterprises which 
lay across our path, and while we relate the story 
of these adventures, the reader must wait a few 
moments before we disclose the American flag. 
But the promise of its coming may buoy him up 
while the preliminary episodes clog the narrative. 
One afternoon we were chugging along in our 
Red Cross ambulance coming down from the first 
aid posts where we had been talking to some 
American Ambulance boys on the French Front, 
when we noticed the arrives were landing regu- 
larly so we knew that the Germans were after 
something in the' neighbourhood — perhaps a big 
gun, perhaps an ammunition dump. We were 



" Our Flag Is Still There " 123 

speculating upon the nature of the target when 
we whirled around a corner and saw it. It was 
a cross-road. Four roads forked there ; the Ger- 
mans, of course, had it marked. It was getting 
its afternoon pour parler; for they believed that 
the ammunition trains would be passing that cross- 
road at that time. And as we looked out of the 
windows of the ambulance our hearts jumped — 
at least Henry's and mine jumped — as we saw 
that between us and the forks of the road a great 
French camion had skidded and stalled, with two 
wheels over the embankment that raised the road 
from the swamp about us, effectually blocking 
our way. " This," said Major Murphy, taking 
in the situation quickly, " is a mighty dangerous 
place." As the word " place " escaped him he 
was on the ground. He had slid through a win- 
dow of the ambulance. The ambulance drivers 
— Singer and Hughes — neglecting to unlock the 
ambulance doors, ran up the road and began 
working with the drivers of the camion to get 
the great van on the road again. The other oc- 
cupants of the ambulance also hurried to the 
camion — through the windows of the ambu- 
lance; no one was left to unbutton the thing for 
Henry and me. Henry insists that he was there 
alone; that he was afraid to follow me through 



124 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

the window for fear of sticking in it. He had 
not been avoiding fats, sugars and starches for 
a year and had no girhsh Hnes in his figure. And 
the arrives were certainly bouncing in rather 
brashly. The rest of us were out in the open 
where we could duck and perhaps avoid the spray 
of shrapnel. But an ambulance was no more 
protection against fifty pounds of German junk 
than an umbrella. And there sat Henry in the 
ambulance wistfully looking through the window 
of the vehicle and realizing that his exposure was 
less in a dignified sitting posture in the ambu- 
lance than it would be horizontally half in and 
half out of the thing, held fast in the vain en- 
deavour to get away. So he waited for the next 
" arrive " to come with commendable fortitude. 
And then it came. It sounded like the old grand- 
daddy of all shells. We fancied we could sense 
its direction ; possibly that was imagination. But 
anyway we looked toward the German lines and 
realized Henry's grave danger. And then it 
struck — whanged with an awful roar about sev- 
enty-five feet from us, against the bare trunk of 
a shell-stripped tree. We knew without looking 
that the shell had hit the tree. Then our con- 
sciousness recorded the fact that a French sol- 
dier had been standing by that tree. And slowly 



"Our Flag Is Still There" 125 

and in terror we turned our eyes tree-ward. The 
tree was a mass of splinters. It looked like a 
special sale of toothpicks in a show window. 
Then we turned our eyes toward the place where 
we had last seen the French soldier. We hardly 
dared to look. But instead of seeing a splatter 
of blood and flesh upon the earth by the tree 
stump, we saw the soldier rise from the buck- 
brush where he had been ducking, and light a 
cigarette. The shell had hit not a dozen feet 
above him, but had sprayed its fountain from 
him, instead of toward him. He had some trou- 
ble lighting his cigarette and was irritated for a 
second at his inconvenience. But so far as we 
could see, the fact that death had reached for him 
and missed him by inches had left no impression 
upon his mind. Three years in war had wrought 
some deep change in him. Was it entirely in his 
nerves or was it deeper than nerves, a certain 
calmness of soul — or was it merely a dramatic 
expression of a soldierly attitude? We did not 
know. But to Henry and me, who had been res- 
cued from death by that tree that stopped the 
shell headed straight for us, it seemed that we 
should come back after the war was over and 
nail a medal of honour and a war cross on the 
stump, and put up a statue there with an all-day 



126 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

program ! We had no desire to hide our fright ! 
It reHeved us to chatter about the tablet on that 
tree stump! 

The French soldier strolled over to us; helped 
to straighten out the camion, and when we learned 
that he was going down the hill we gave him a 
lift. He was a hairy, dirty, forsaken looking 
poilu who, washed and shaved and classified, 
turned out to be an exchange professor from the 
Sorbonne, who had spent a year at Harvard, and 
it was he who told us of the bombing of the hos- 
pital at Landrecourt; we'll call it Landrecourt to 
fool the censor, who thinks there is no hospital 
there. At the mention of the hospital the Major 
turned to us and said: "That's where we sent 
that pretty red-headed nurse who came over with 
you on the boat. And," added the Major, " that 
is the hospital equipped by Mrs. Chesman, of New 
York! " whose name is also changed to fool the 
censor. It was a better known name! 

" Say," exclaimed Henry, " the Aunt of the 
Gilded Youth!" 

" You mean our ambulance boy who came 
over on the boat with you — the multimillion- 
aire ? " asked the head of the American Ambu- 
lance service. 

" The same," answered Henry, who turned to 







He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and was 
irritated for a second at his inconvenience 



"Our Flag Is Still There" 129 

me and said in his oratorical voice : " The plot 
thickens." Then the Frenchman told us the story 
of the raid : How the airmen had come at mid- 
night, dropped their bombs, killing nurses and 
doctors, and how the discipline of the hospital did 
not even flutter. He said that the head nurse 
summoned all her nurses, marched them to the 
abri at the rear of the hospital, and stood at the 
door of the abri, while the girls filed in, and just 
as the last nurse was going into the dugout with 
the head nurse standing outside, the airmen 
dropped a bomb upon her and erased her ! None 
of the nurses inside was hurt. Two doctors 
were killed and a number of patients. Landre- 
court was on our way and we hurried to it. 

Was there ever a martial adventure without a 
love story in it? Little did it seem to Henry and 
me as we left our humble homes in Wichita and 
Emporia to make the world safe for democracy, 
that we two thick-set, sedentary, new world re- 
plicas of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza should 
be the chaperons and custodians of a love affair. 
We were not equipped for it. We were travelling 
light, and our wives were three or four thousand 
miles away. No middle-aged married man gets 
on well with a love affair who is out of daily reach 
of his wife. For when he gets into the barbed 



130 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

wire tangle of a love affair, he needs the wise 
counsel of a middle-aged woman. But here we 
were, two fat old babes in the woods and here 
came the Gilded Youth, the Eager Soul and the 
Young Doctor — sping ! like a German shell — 
right into our midst, as it were. 

There at Landrecourt we found the Eager Soul, 
a badly scared young person — but tremendously 
plucky ! And mad — say, that girl was doing a 
strafing job that would have made the kaiser 
blush! And the fine part of it was, that its ex- 
pression was entirely in repression. There was 
no laugh in her face, no joy in her heart, and we 
scarcely knew the sombre, effective, business-like 
young person who greeted us. And then across 
the court we saw something else that interested 
us. For there, walking with his patrician aunt, 
we saw the Gilded Youth. Evidently he had 
heard of the raid, had run over from Valaincourt 
on some sort of military permission. 

" Oh, yes," answered the Eager Soul to our 
enquiring eyes. " Mrs. Chesman — this is prac- 
tically her hospital. I mean she and her group 
are keeping it equipped and going — a wonderful 
work. I mean here is a real thing for a woman 
to do. And, oh, the need of it! " 

"Nice sort?'' This from Henry, observing 




Oh, yes," answered the Eager Soul to our enquiring 
eyes. " Mrs. Chessman — this is practically her 
hospital " 



" Our Flag Is Still There " 133 

that there was no move toward us, on the part of 
the Gilded Youth and Auntie. Henry may have 
had his theory for their splendid isolation. But 
it received no stimulus when the Eager Soul an- 
swered : 

" Oh, yes, I believe so. I haven't met her yet. 
They all say she is charming." Henry looked at 
me. She caught the glance. Then to cover his 
tracks he grinned and said : " Charm seems to 
run in their family." 

" Yes," she returned amiably. " One meets so 
many nice people on the boat." 

And Henry, still in pursuit of useful social in- 
formation, insisted : " Well, are they as nice in 
the war zone as they are — on the boat ? " 

We got our first dimple then, and the Eager 
Soul tucked in a wisp of red hair, as she an- 
swered : 

" W^ell, really, I've been too busy to know." 
She turned absent-mindedly toward the figure of 
the Gilded Youth, across the court. But the dim- 
ples and the smile faded and she closed the door 
firmly and finally on romance, when she said : 
" On the record of service shown by my entrance 
card, they have made me assistant to the new 
head nurse who is coming over from Souilly to- 
night." 



134 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

After we had told her that we were going to 
American headquarters soon, she smiled again, to 
show us that she knew that when we went prob- 
ably we would see the Young Doctor. But she 
let the smile stand as her only response to Henry's 
suggestion of a message. In another moment 
she turned to her work. 

"Well," said Henry, "some pride! 'One 
meets so many nice people on the boat ! ' The 
idea being that her outfit at home is just as good 
as Auntie's group in New York, even if he didn't 
introduce her ! You know I rather like the social 
spunk of our Great Middle West ! " 

While we were talking the Gilded Youth began 
moving Auntie slowly but rather directly around 
the court to us. It occurred to me that perhaps 
he realized that we were the only social godfathers 
that the Eager Soul had in Europe, and that if 
he introduced us to Auntie it would be an indi- 
cation that the affair of the boat, if it was an 
affair, was to be put upon a social basis! And 
in two minutes more he had docked Auntie at our 
pier. A large, brusk, well-groomed, good-look- 
ing woman of fifty was Auntie. Her Winthrop 
and Endicott blood advertised itself in her Bos- 
tonese, but she was sound and strong and the 
way she instantly got at the invoice price of 



"Our Flag Is Still There" 135 

Henry and his real worth, pleased me. She was 
genuine American. The thing that troubled me 
was the fear that Henry would begin too soon to 
lambast onion soup. But he didn't and in a few 
moments we were having this dialogue : 

Henry : " Oh, yes, indeed; we've grown fond 
of her. Her father was — " 

Auntie : " Oh, yes, I knew her father. Mr. 
Chesman and he were interested together in New 
Mexican mining claims in the eighties; I believe 
they made some money. But — " 

The Gilded Youth : " Well, Auntie — would 
you mind telling me how — ? " 

Auntie : " Why, on her application blank, 
of course, with her father's name, age and resi- 
dence." 

The Gilded One : " But you never men- 
tioned it to me? " 

Auntie : " Nor to her, either. Why should 
I? This is hardly the place to organize the Co- 
lonial Dames ! I believe you said a few minutes 
ago that you had met her on the boat." 

Henry : " One meets so many nice people on 
the boat ! " 

Me: "You've heard of the woman who said 
she didn't know the man socially, she had just 
met him coming over on the boat ! " 



136 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

The Gilded Youth looked quickly at me, catch- 
ing me suppressing a wink at Henry, who 
grinned at the expiring ghost of it. Then Auntie 
led the talk to the raid of the night before; and 
invited us to come up for a night's sleep in a 
civilized bed in the hospital. We were quartered 
for the night with the Ambulance boys, sleeping 
in a barn loft, so naturally, we accepted her invi- 
tation. Just as we were leaving to get our bag- 
gage, out into the court came the Eager Soul bear- 
ing a letter. We did not see the address, but it 
was, alas, plainly dimpled in her face, for the 
Gilded Youth to see, and after greeting him only 
pleasantly, she handed the letter to us, saying: 
" Would you be good enough to deliver this for 
me at Gonrecourt next week, as you are passing? 
It is to a friend I met on the boat! " 

" Yes," said Henry; " one meets so many nice 
people on the boat." 

" Sometimes," she answered, as she turned to 
her work. 

That night we slept like logs until after mid- 
night; then the moon rose, and the hospital be- 
gan to come to life. The stir and murmur of the 
place wakened us. And we realized what a moon- 
light night means in a hospital near the front 
line. It means terror. No one slept after moon- 



"Our Flag Is Still There" 137 

rise. It was a new experience for Henry and me. 
So we rose and met it. And we realized that 
in scores of hospitals all over the war zone, on 
the side of the allies, similar scenes were enact- 
ing. The Germans were literally tearing the 
nerves out of hundreds of nurses by their raid- 
ing campaign — nurses whom the raiders did not 
visit, but who were threatened by every moon- 
light night ! 

It must have been after two in the morning, 
when we saw the Eager Soul and the Gilded 
Youth walking around the court as they used to 
pace the deck together. Once or twice they 
passed our window, and we heard their voices. 
They were having some sort of a tall talk on phil- 
osophical matters, which annoyed Henry. The 
ocean and onion soup and philosophical theorizing 
never seemed reasonable, normal expressions of 
anything properly in the cosmos to Henry; he 
professed to believe that persons who tolerated 
these things would sooner or later be caught 
using the words " group " and " reaction " and 
" hypothesis," and he would have none of them. 
But for all that she used the word group and 
once confessed that she was a subscriber to the 
New Republic, Henry did like the Eager Soul; 
so he waked me up from a doze to say : " Bill, 



138 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

she's putting him through the eye of the needle 
all right. And he's sliding through slick as goose- 
grease. I heard him telling her a minute ago that 
the war isn't for boundaries and geography; but 
for a restatement of human creeds. Then she 
said that steam and electricity have over-capi- 
talized the world ; that we are paying too highly 
for superintendence and that the price of super- 
intendence must come down, and wages must 
come up. Then he said that he and his class will 
go in the fires burning out there — melted like 
wax. And she told him that they both had a lot 
of stolen goods on them — bodies and minds, and 
hearts cultivated at the expense of their fellow 
creatures whose lives had been narrowed that 
theirs might be broadened. And you should 
have heard her talk about the Young Doctor — a 
self-made man, who had earned his way through 
college and medical school, and made his own 
place professionally. She said he was the Herald 
of the New Day. " Bill," sighed Henry, " what 
would you give if you could talk like that — 
again ? " But from me, drowsily, came this : 
" Henry — do you suppose she will get around 
to that slapping tonight she promised him on the 
boat? That would be worth staying up to see ! " 



"Our Flag Is Still There" 139 

" She'll never slap him. He'll never need it. 
She's talked him clear out of the mood! " 

" Yes, she has — yes, she has," came from me. 
And Henry insisted : 

" She may have to slap the Doctor ; but she has 
steered this boy out of the danger zone into the 
open sea of friendship." 

" Oh, yes, she has ; oh, yes, she has," came the 
echo from the other bed ! And Henry subsided. 

But the buzzing about the hospital would not 
let us sleep. At three o'clock evidently they were 
serving tea to the nurses, or lunch of some kind. 
The moon was shining straight down into the 
court; the Gilded Youth and the Eager Soul had 
gone in, and another couple, a stenographer and 
a hospital orderly were using it as a parlour. 

" Queer, queer business, this love-making under 
the rustle of the wings of death," said Henry. 
A French plane flying across had filled the com- 
pound for a moment. But everyone soon rec- 
ognized its peculiar buzz. Then for a few sec- 
onds from afar came the low ominous hum of 
the German planes. But they circled away from 
us. Perhaps the French drove them back. 
However, it was the excitement in the court that 
caused Henry's remark. For the young people 



140 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

did not deflect their monotonous course about the 
compound, when the sky-gazers had returned in- 
doors. Around and around they went, talking, 
talking, talking, with the low insistent murmur 
of deeply interested people. Their nerves were 
taut; emotion was raw; they were young, and 
their blood moved riotouslyi, And tliere was 
the moon, the moon that, since man could turn his 
face upward, has been the symbol of the thing 
called love. And now all over that long line 
slashed across the face of Europe, the moon is 
the herald of death. Men see it rise in terror, for 
they know that the season of the moon is the 
season of slaughter. Yet there they walked in 
the hospital yard, two unknown lovers, who were 
true to the moon. 

Henry's next remark was: " Bill, fancy when 
you were young doing your courting out there 
where a shell is liable to wipe you out any sec- 
ond. We at least had the advantage of elm 
trees to protect us from the shafts of death." 

" Do you suppose, Henry," ansvv'ered his 
friend, " that they miss the drip of oars, the shade 
of the overhanging willows, the suggestive whis- 
per of waters frisking over the ripples at the 
ford? How can they make love in such a 
place?" 



" Our Flag Is Still There " 141 

" ' Gold,' " replied Henry, quoting from Solo- 
mon, who was wise, " ' is where you find it ! ' " 
Then we heard the insistence of the lovers' bab- 
ble drawing near us again. As they turned a 
corner, Henry heaved a sigh at the perversity 
of youth in the flaunting neglect of sleep and 
death, which ever are vital to middle years. We 
both looked out to the white courtyard, heard 
the snarl of another plane, obviously French, but 
still disconcerting, saw the slow even pace of the 
lovers, unaffected by the approaching growl of 
the plane, and it came to me to quote one wiser 
even than Solomon : *' O death, where is thy 
sting!" 

We took but a cat-nap that night, and in the 
morning set down the score on our love affair. 
The record indicates that during the day Henry 
had lost; during the night he had won. He put 
it down in his black book against the time when 
we should get to Paris, where money would buy 
things. For we ate at camps, slept in hospitals 
or in barns or in mess rooms of the ambulance 
men, and day by day and night after night we 
saw much misery and were " acquainted with 
grief." There are so many kinds of hospitals in 
France! The great streams of broken men that 
flow unceasingly down from the front are divided 



142 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

as they reach the base hospitals and field hos- 
pitals into scores of smaller currents, each flow- 
ing to a separate place, where specialists treat the 
various cases. The blind go one way; those 
dumb with shell-shock go another; jaw cases 
separate from men with scalp wounds, and hip 
fractures are divided from shoulder fractures as 
the sheep from the goats. Travelling about 
among the hospitals one picks up curious unre- 
lated and unexplained bits of information; as, 
for instance, that the British Tommy is the most 
patient man in Europe under pain. He likes to 
distinguish between himself and his wound and 
is likely to reply to the doctor any fine morning, 
" Me? Oh, I'm right at the top form, Sir; but 
my leg is bothering me a bit. Sir! " The Cana- 
dian isn't so game under a roof as he is under 
the open sky and in the charge. And the Ameri- 
can grunts more than he should. But here is 
a queer thing. The French tubercular soldier 
is despondent. With Americans, tuberculosis 
breeds hope. Perhaps it is the buoyancy of the 
young blood of our country; but no American 
feels he is ever going to die with tuberculosis. 
He feels he is hit hard; that it may take six 
months or a year to get on his feet; after that — 
he goes on dreaming his dream. But the tuber- 



" Our Flag Is Still There " 143 

cular French soldiers are the saddest looking men 
in Europe. 

Back in Kansas last spring we had heard a , 
story to the effect that the Germans were inoculat- \p p 
ing the French and Belgians behind the lines of 
the allies with tubercular bacteria. We asked 
French and American and British doctors about 
that story, and they all answered that there was 
nothing to it. The doctors told us that the Ger- 
mans have a cheaper and better way to fill France 
with tuberculosis than by wasting serum on their 
enemies. And then, one day in a tuberculosis 
hospital we picked up this story, which explained 
what the doctors meant. 

We met a young man from Lille. It was his 
birthday ; Henry bought him a bouquet. He told 
us his story. He said : 

" Three years ago when the war broke out I 
was 19 years old and was living in Lille with my 
parents. The Germans came to our house one 
day with their guns and took me away. They 
took me to a town in Germany; I think it was 
Essen, where they made me work in an iron or 
steel mill. I worked fourteen hours a day, slept 
on straw outside the works in a shed, had only 
the clothes they took me in and had only bran to 
eat!" 



144 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

"Only bran?" we asked, doubting it. 

" Only bran," the interpreter repeated, and 
from half a dozen cots near by, where others 
who had suffered as he had, heard our question, 
came the echo of his confirmation, " Only bran 
to eat ! " He soon caught cold, and soon the 
" cold " became tuberculosis, and after three 
years of this his sick days exceeded his work days, 
and in due course he and five hundred others were 
assembled, put on a train and shipped out of 
Germany through Switzerland to Evian in 
France. Three hundred thousand of these poor 
husks, men, women, and children, have been 
dumped into France in the last seven months. 
Two trainloads of them arrive at Evian every 
day. The men and women, mostly tubercular, 
do not tarry. They push on into France, a 
deadly white stream. 

In time the week ended that marked our first 
trip to the French front. During that week we 
lived almost entirely in the war zone, and under 
war conditions. The food was good — better 
than good, it was excellent, but not plentiful, and 
the beds were clean and full of sleep. The only 
physical discomfort we found was in the lack of 
drinking water. We were warned against all 
local water. 



'' Our Flag Is Still There " 145 

My feelings on the subject of the French coffee 
and milk were something like Henry's antipathy 
to onion soup. But we both loved water with 
our meals. We had been vaccinated against ty- 
phoid, and we were rather insistent that we could 
drink any kind of water, if it was reasonably 
clean. But men said " this country is no place to 
drink water. It has been a battle-ground and 
a cemetery for three years." Still we insisted, 
and then, Mr. Norton, head of the American 
ambulance, told us this one : " Out behind a 
barrage once near the Champagne; helping the 
stretcher bearers; nasty weather, rain, and cold. 
But there we were. We couldn't get in. We 
ducked from shell hole to shell hole. Finally I 
found a nice deep one, with water in the bottom 
— oh, maybe five feet of water in a fifteen foot 
hole, and I stayed there; two days and nights. 
My canteen went dry, and for a day or two I 
scooped water out of the shell hole and drank it. 
Good enough tasting water so far as that goes, 
and fresh too ! But at the end of the third 
day, I decided it wasn't agreeing with me and 
quit." 

" Why? " we asked. " Did you leave the shell 
hole?" 

" No — oh, no. It was a good shell hole. I 



146 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

stayed. But you know Fritzie came up ! " he 
answered. 

So our taste for water with our meals, which 
is America's choicest privilege, passed. Henry 
could drink the coffee, but it didn't taste good to 
me. The brackish red wine they served with 
the army ration tasted like diluted vinegar and 
looked like pokeberry ink. It seemed only good 
to put in our fountain pens. A tablespoon ful 
would last me all day. Our week's trip ended at 
Monter-en-Der, where there was a hotel and an 
Ambulance corps unit that had been over to visit 
the American troops and had brought back from 
the commissary department much loot. Among 
other things was water — bottled water, pure un- 
fermented water. And when we sat at table they 
brought me a bottle. 

Try going seven days on pokeberry ink and 
boiled coffee yourself and note the reaction. 
Your veins will be dry ; your stomach will 
crackle as it grinds the food. The water in that 
bottle, a quart bottle, evaporated. They brought 
another. It disappeared. They brought a third. 
The waiters in the hotel were attracted by the 
sight. No Frenchman ever drinks water with 
his meals, and the spectacle of this American 
sousing himself with water while he ate was a 



''Our Flag Is Still There" 147 

rare sight. The waiters gathered in the corner 
to watch me. Henry saw them, and motioned 
toward me, and tapped his forehead. They went 
and brought other waiters and men from the bar. 
He was a rare bird; this American going on a 
big drunk on water. So they peered in doors, 
through windows and stood in the diningroom 
corners to watch the fourth bottle go down. And 
when at the end of the meal the American rose, 
and walked through the crowd, they made way 
for him. A desperate man at least commands 
respect, whatever his delusion may be. 

And that night we left the French front, and 
nosed our car toward Paris. 

There we made preparations to go to the head- 
quarters of the American Army. In Paris also 
we got into our new regulation Red Cross uni- 
forms. Ever since man first pinned a buffalo 
tail to the back of his belt, and stuck a rooster 
feather in his matted hair, he has been proud of 
his uniform. Sex vanity expresses itself most 
gorgeously in a uniform, and when they put 
Henry and me into uniforms, even carefully re- 
pressed Red Cross uniforms, open at the neck 
and with blue dabs on our coat lapels to distin- 
guish us from the " first class fighting man," we 
were so proud that often five or six consecutive 



148 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

minutes passed when we weren't afraid of what 
our wives would say about the $124 each had 
spent for the togs. At times our attitude toward 
our wives was not unhke that of drunken rabbits 
hunting brazenly for the dogs! But when wi 
slipped into citizen clothes, sobriety and remorse 
covered us, and we shook sad heads. We wore 
the uniforms little about Paris; for our Sam 
Browne belts kept us returning salutes until our 
arms hurt. They couldn't break me of the habit 
of saluting with a newspaper or a package or a 
pencil in my hand. And my return of the inter- 
minable round of salutes from French, British, 
and Italian soldiers who throng Paris, probably 
insulted — all unbeknownst to me — hundreds of 
our allies, and made them sneer at our flag. So 
it seemed best for us to wear these uniforms only 
where soldiers congregated who would know us 
for the gawks that we were and forgive us our 
military trespasses. Then a real day came when 
our Red Cross duties took us to General Persh- 
ing's headquarters. 

For Americans during the year 1918, " Some- 
where in France," will mean the Joan of Arc 
country. It is not in the war zone, but lies among 
the hills of Central France, a four or five hours' 
auto ride from Paris. To reach the American 




He was a rare bird; this American going on a bi^ 
drunk on water 



"Our Flag Is Still There" 151 

" Somewhere in France " from Paris, one crosses 
the battle-field of the Marne, and we passed it the 
day after the third anniversary, when all the hun- 
dreds of roadside graves that marked the French 
advance were a-bloom and a-flutter with the tri- 
colour. Great doings were afoot the day before 
on that battle-field. Bands had played trium- 
phant songs, and orators had spoken and the 
leaders of France — soldier and civilian — had 
come out and wept and France had released her 
emotions and was better for it. We passed 
through Meaux and hurried on east to St. Dizier, 
where we stopped for the night. We put up at 
a dingy little inn, filled to overflowing with as 
curious a company as ever gathered under one 
roof. Of course there were French soldiers — 
scores of them, mostly officers in full dress, going 
to the line or coming from it. Then there were 
fathers and mothers of soldiers and sisters and 
sweethearts of soldiers and wives of soldiers 
bound for the front or coming home. And there 
we were, the only Americans in the house, with 
just enough French to order " des oeufs " and 
coffee " au kit " and " ros bif and jambon and 
pain " and to ask how much and then make them 
say it slowly and stick the sum up on their fin- 
gers. We were having engine trouble. And our 



152 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

car was groaning and coughing and muttering in 
the gloomy little court of the inn. Around the 
court ran the sleeping rooms, and under one end, 
forty feet from the diningroom, was what was 
once the stable, and what now is the garage. 
Frenchmen wandered up, looked at our chauffeur 
(from Utica, N. Y.) tried to diagnose the 
case, found we did not understand and then 
moved away. But it was a twelve-cylinder Amer- 
ican machine and the Frenchmen, discovering 
that, kept coming back to it. As we sat on the 
cement platform of the tavern, kicking our heels 
against it and bemoaning the follies of youth 
which had corrupted our Freshman and Sopho- 
more French, there came and sat beside us a 
pretty woman. She had black snappy eyes, fresh 
dark skin, and jet black hair, so curly that it was 
almost frowsy. She listened to us for a mo- 
ment, then hopped aboard our talk like a boy 
flipping a street car : " Kansas — eh ? I once 
lived in Oklahoma City. My father ran the Bee 
Hive!" 

"Angels of mercy, angels of light!" This 
from me. " Say, will you interpret for us? " 

" Sure mike ! sir," she said. And then added : 
" And if it's engine trouble my husband upstairs 
is a chauffeur. Shall I get him?" And when 



"Our Flag Is Still There" 153 

she returned with him, he fell to, glad enough to 
get a look into a twelve-cylinder American car. 
Henry stood by him, and with the woman acting 
as interlocutor, between our driver and her hus- 
band we soon had the trouble located and the 
dissimulator — Henry maintains that all engine 
trouble is connected in some way with a dissimu- 
lator — rectified, and while the job was going on, 
he expounded the twelve cylinders to the French, 
puffed on his dreadnaught pipe, and left the lady 
from Oklahoma City to me. She was keen for 
talk. Between her official communiques to her 
husband and our driver, she got in this : 

" Yes, I know Frank Wickoff in Oklahoma 
City — knew him when he was poor as Job's tur- 
key, and then my folks used to borrow money 
at his bank. Before we came to Oklahoma City 
we lived in Austin. We ran the Good Luck, or 
was it the Fair; no, we ran the Fair in Dallas." 
At a quick look at her face from me she laughed 
and said : " Oh, yes, I'm Jew all right. No," she 
returned to a query, " I never was in Wichita. 
But when we moved to Blackwell we used to take 
the Beacon!" 

" Henry, come here," came the call from me. 
" Here is old Subscriber and Constant Reader! " 
Then Henry came up and the subsequent proceed- 



154 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

ings interested me no more. For Henry took the 
witness. And the three of us, kicking our heels 
on the cement wall below us, sat swapping yarns 
about mutual friends in the Southwest. It seems 
that in France the lady is a pedlar who goes from 
town to town on market day with notions and 
runs a little notion wagon through the country 
between times. She told us of an air raid of the 
night before on St. Dizier where eleven people 
had been killed and urged us to stay for the 
funeral the next day. It was to be a sight worth 
seeing. Most of the dead were women and chil- 
dren. There was nothing military in the little 
town but the two hotels that housed soldiers and 
their friends and relatives going to the front and 
coming back. Yet the Germans had come, 
dropped a score of bombs on the town, then had 
flown away for another town, dropping their 
hateful eggs across country as they went. Lune- 
ville had lost half a dozen, Fismes half a score, 
and other towns of the neighbourhood, accord- 
ingly — all civilians, mostly women and children ; 
and not a town raided had any military works or 
if it had a munition factory, the bombs had hit 
miles from the plants. 

We were beginning to realize slowly what a 
hell of torture and disease and suffering this war 




Henry puffed on his dreadnaught pipe and left the 
lady from Oklahoma City to me 



"Our Flag Is Still There" 157 

means to France. Half a million tuberculars in 
her homes, spreading poison there; two million 
homeless refugees quartered beyond the war 
zone ; millions of soldiers living in the homes fifty 
miles back from the line, every month bringing 
new men to these homes left by their comrades 
returning to the battle front; air raids by night 
slaying women and babies ; commerce choked with 
the offering to the war god; soldiers filling the 
highways; food, clothing and munitions taking 
all the space upon the railroads ; fuel almost pro- 
hibitively high; food scarce; and always talk of 
the war — of nothing, absolutely nothing but the 
war and its horrors. That France has held 
so long under this curse proves the miracle 
of her divine courage! As we sat under the 
shrouded torches in the inn courtyard and con- 
sidered what life really means to the men and 
women of St. Dizier, once more we wondered 
how we at home would react under the terrific 
punishment which these people are taking; what 
would Wichita do with her houses bombed, her 
homes crowded with refugees; her parks and 
schools and public buildings turned into barracks, 
her stores filled with gaping empty shelves, her 
railroad yards clogged with munitions, and ever 
the mourners going about the street and man to 



158 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

his long home. ■ How would Emporia act with 
the pestilence that stalketh in darkness for ever 
near her ; with her women and children slaugh- 
tered, merely to break the morale of the people 
and cause them to plead for peace; with cripples 
from the war hidden away in a hundred sad 
homes, with fatherless children and children born 
out of wedlock among the things that one had to 
face daily? Perhaps our young Jewish friend 
thought we were wearying of her. For she rose 
and said, " Well, good-night, gents — pleasant 
dreams ! " 

Pleasant dreams — indeed ! 

But in the morning we arose refreshed and hur- 
ried along a misty plain, forty miles or so from 
the American troops. Always in the background 
were great bushy trees, and lush green grass, and 
the thing was composed. How the French man- 
age to compose their landscape is too much for 
me. But at any of a thousand points the scene 
might have been photographed for a Corot, by 
getting a few good-looking girls in nighties to 
dance on the grass of the middle distance! 
American landscape has to be picked apart to have 
its picture taken ; a tree selected here, a hill there, 
a brook yonder, and if ladies in nighties are 
needed, they are brought from afar! They are 



" Our Flag Is Still There " 1 59 

not indigenous to the soil. But one feels that in 
France they might come sidling out from behind 
any willow clump with their toes rouged ready 
for the dance! 

The road that morning seemed traversing a 
great picture gallery, unwinding into life as from 
a dream within a dream! And then, after two 
hours of joyous landscape, we waked and saw 
America ! Now America was not a vision ; it was 
substantial, if not beautiful. As we switched 
around a bend in the road we came upon America 
full-sized and blood raw — a farmer boy — 
bronzed, milk-eyed, good-natured, with the Mid- 
dle West written all over him. He wore a serv- 
ice hat at a forward pitch over his eyes; in his 
hands, conched to tremulo the sound, he held an 
harmonica; his eyes were aslit in the ecstasy 
of his own music; from the crook of his arm 
dangled a bridle, and he sat cross-legged high up 
on the quarter deck of a great four-story, full- 
rigged Missouri mule. He didn't salute us but 
called " Hi " as we passed, and then we knew 
that " our flag was still there " and that we were 
near our troops. 

The boys must be popular in the neighbour- 
hood. For in the next village, which by the way 
was a town of ten thousand, our American Red 



i6o Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

Cross uniforms were treated with distinguished 
courtesy. Henry wanted a match. He could 
talk no French but a little boy at the inn, seeing 
him fumbling through his clothes with an un- 
lighted pipe, came running to us with a little blue 
box of matches. Henry gave the boy a franc — 
more to be amiable than anything else. The boy 
flashed home to his mother proud as Punch ! And 
just as we were pulling out of the village the boy 
came running to us with another little blue box 
of matches. We thought the boy had discovered 
that matches would bring a franc a box from 
Americans and was preparing to make his for- 
tune. So Henry took the box, and as the car 
was moving handed the boy another franc. We 
noticed him waving his hands and shaking his 
head. And when we were a mile out of the vil- 
lage Henry opened his second box and found his 
original franc in it. The boy's mother was 
ashamed that he should have taken any money 
for a box of matches, and had made him bring 
back the money with another box to show how 
much the French appreciate the Americans com- 
ing to France, We met many instances like that. 
Soon the road was cluttered up with American 
soldiers. They were driving motors, whacking 
mules, stringing along the by-paths and sweating 




And he sat cross legged 



"Our Flag Is Still There" 163 

copiously under the autumn sun. We wondered 
in passing what an American farmer boy and his 
self-respecting mule thought of the two-wheeled 
French carts they were using. Then we turned 
the corner and came into a new view ; we saw our 
first troop of American soldiers quartered in a 
French village. They were busy building bar- 
racks. We stopped and visited them, and they 
showed us their quarters : In barns, in lofts of 
houses, in cellars, in vacant stores — everywhere 
that human beings could slip in, the American 
soldiers had installed themselves. The Y. M. 
C. A. hut was finished, and in it a score of boys 
were writing letters, playing rag-time on the 
pianos, and jollying the handsome, wise-looking 
American women at the counter across one end 
of the room. An Irish Catholic padre in a 
major's uniform was in charge of the sports of 
the camp and he literally permeated the Y. M. 
C. A. hut. He was the leader of the men. The 
little village where this troop lived faded into the 
plain and we rode again for five miles or so, and 
then came to another and another and still an- 
other. At that time thirteen villages in an arc 
of forty miles or so contained most of our Ameri- 
can troops. We stopped many times on our long 
day's journey. Once we stopped for mid-day 



1 64 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

dinner and there came to Henry and me our first 
estrangement. It is curious, as the poet sings, 
" how Hght a thing may move dissension be- 
tween hearts that love — hearts that the world in 
vain has tried and sorrow but more closely tied." 
Well — the thing that came between us was cook- 
ing — cooking that has parted more soul mates 
than any other one thing in the world ! For two 
weeks more or less we had been eating in the 
French mess, or eating at country hotels or coun- 
try homes in France, eating good French country 
cooking, and it was excellent. A mid-day meal 
typically was a melon, or a clear soup, or onion 
soup, brown and strong ; a small bit of rare steak 
or chop, or a thin sliced roast in the juice with 
browned potatoes or carrots, a vegetable entree — 
peas, spinach, served dry and minced, or string 
beans; then raw fruit, and cheese. The bread, of 
course, was black war bread, but crusty and fine. 
That was my idea of a lunch for the gods. What 
we got at the American mess was this : a thick, 
frowsy, greasy soup — a kind of larded dish- 
water ; thin steak fried hard as nails, boiled beans 
with fried bacon laid on the beans — not pork and 
beans, but called pork and beans — with the beans 
slithery and hard and underdone; lettuce, cab- 
bage, and onions soused in vinegar, white bread 



"Our Flag Is Still There" 165 

cut an inch thick, soft and spongy, boiled pota- 
toes that had stood in the water after they were 
cooked done, and then bread pudding, made by 
pouring water on bread, sticking in some raisins, 
stirring in an egg, and serving a floury syrup 
over it for sauce ! There was enough, of course, 
to keep soul and body together. But the cooking 
had spoiled a lot of mighty good food. And 
Henry liked it! There were two preachers with 
us, and they bragged about the " good old Amer- 
ican cooking! " And when they heard me roar 
they said, " He is insulting the star-spangled ban- 
ner," and Henry threatened to take my pajamas 
out of his black valise! 

After passing through many villages crowded 
with our troops we came to the headquarters of 
the American Expeditionary forces. We found 
General Pershing in a long brick building — two 
or three stories high, facing a wide white parade 
ground. The place had been used evidently as a 
barracks for French soldiers in peace times, and 
was fitted to the uses of our army. We met a 
member of his staff, a sort of outer guard, and 
with scarcely a preliminary halt were taken to 
the general. He seems easy of access, which is 
a sign that he plays no favourites and has no 
court. Anyone with business can see him. He 



1 66 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

met us in a plain bare room with a square new 
American-looking desk in the midst of it. He 
sat behind the desk, cordial enough but with the 
air of one who will be pleased to have business 
start, and politenesses stop. So we plunged 
straight to the business in hand. We were from 
the American Red Cross in Paris, and our leader 
had come to get a definite idea of what part the 
Red Cross was to play in the recreation activities 
of the army. The Y. M. C. A. was spending mil- 
lions upon recreation problems. The Red Cross 
had millions to spend. 

Recreation in Paris, of course, means soldier 
hostels, homes, clubs, houses where American sol- 
diers can go while in Paris on leave of absence. 
The Red Cross had one single donation of one 
million dollars to be devoted to a club for Ameri- 
can soldiers in Paris. The Y. M. C. A. had 
started to equip two or three great Parisian ho- 
tels as clubs. The Red Cross had money donated 
for certain other recreation purposes in camp. 
The Y, M. C. A. believed it should control the 
camp and Parisian recreation activities of the 
American troops. 

We stated our case about as briefly as '-^ is here 
written, and in three minutes. In two i.iinutes 
more General Pershing had assured us that there 



''Our Flag Is Still There" 167 

would be no need to spend money for hotels or 
clubs in Paris, that few soldiers would be given 
leave to go to Paris, and that the lavish expendi- 
ture of American money in Paris would be bad 
for America's standing in France. 

And then he allotted the recreation problems 
of men in the hospitals to the Red Cross, and the 
recreation enterprises for men outside of hos- 
pitals to the Y. M. C. A. 

He was brief, exact, candid and final. He 
stood for the most part, as he talked ; spoke low, 
fumbled for no word, and looked into his hearers' 
eyes. The politician looks over their shoulders. 
We spoke for two or three minutes with him 
about the work of our troops this winter, and 
were impressed with the decision of the man. 
He seemed — perhaps subconsciously — afraid 
that public opinion at home would demand that 
he put our men into the trenches to hold their own 
sector too early. He evidently believed that dur- 
ing our first winter the men should go in by squads 
and perhaps companies or later in regimental 
units for educational purposes, working with the 
English and the Frencl "earning the trench game. 
But we felt clearly that- he believed strongly that 
it would be spring before we should occupy any 
portion of the line ourselves. There was a firm- 



1 58 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

ness about him, not expressed in words. No one 
could say that he had said what we thought he 
had conveyed to us. Yet each of us was sure that 
the General would not be moved from his de- 
cision. He breathes confidence in him into peo- 
ple's hearts. He never seems confidential; 
though he is entirely candid. Again one feels 
sure that there is no court around him. He 
seems wise with his own wisdom, which is con- 
stantly in touch with the wisdom of every one 
who may have business with him. He will not 
be knocked off his feet; he will do no mihtary 
stunts. The American soldiers will not go into 
action until we have enough troops to hold our 
part of the line and we will not start an offensive 
until we can back it up. This all came glowing 
out of the firm, kind, wise, soldierly face of Gen- 
eral Pershing, and it needed no words to verify 
it. Superfluous words might have contradicted 
the message of his mien; for they might have 
added boast to simple statement. 

[it is all so orderly, so organized, so American, 
this thing we are doing in France. It is like the 
effective manipulation of a great trustJ The 
leadership of the American forces in France in 
the army and in the Red Cross and the Y. M. 
C. A. is made up of men known all over the 



" Our Flag Is Still There " 169 

United States; the names of those leaders who 
are soldiers may not be mentioned. They have 
dropped out of American civilian life so quietly 
that they are scarcely missed. Yet [for vi^eeks we 
lived in the hotel with one of the prominent fig- 
ures in American finance who is working eight- 
een hours a day buying supplies, assembling war 
material — food, fuel, clothing — putting up 
scores of miles of barracks, building a railroad 
from tidewater to the American headquarters, 
equipping it with American engines, freight cars, 
and passenger coaches ; sinking piles for the first 
time in a harbour which has been occupied for 
two thousand years, and unloading great ships 
there which were supposed to be too big for that 
port. He is the marvel of the French. Hun- . 
dreds like him are over there lending a hand.^' 
They are about to handle in a year an army half 
as large as the other allies have been three years 
building. Houses, furniture, fuel, food, guns, 
ammunition, clothing, transportation, communi- 
cation, medicine, surgeons, recreation — the 
whole routine of life for a million men and more 
must be provided in advance by these organizing 
men. ^This work, so far as these men consider it, 
is purely altruistic. They are sacrificing com- 1 
forts at home, money-making opportunities at \ 



170 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

home, and they are working practically for noth- 
ing, paying their own expenses, and under the 
censor's wise rules these men can have not even 
the empty husks of passing famej For their 
names may not be mentioned in the news of what 
the Americans are doing in Europe. Yet wher- 
ever one goes in Europe he is running across these 
first-class men.' Their sincerity and patriotism 
may not be questioned. 

But they are getting something real out of it 
all. The renewal of youth in their faces through 
unstinted giving is beautiful to see. They are 
going into a new adventure — a high and splen- 
did adventure, and while many of them may snap 
back after the war to the old egoistic individual- 
istic way of looking at life, their examples will 
persist, and their lives, when they go back to the 
old rut, will never be the same lives that they were 
before. I 

Butnere is a story, an American story which 
has in it the makings of a hero tale. It came to 
us in Paris, bit by bit. We saw it and no one 
told it to us. Yet here it is, and it should begin 
in form. Once upon a time in America when 
the people were changing their gods, a certain 
major god of finance named James Hazen Hyde, 
head of a great insurance company, fell into dis- 



" Our Flag Is Still There " 171 

favour; and the people, changing their gods, cast 
him away. If men had been serving the old gods 
they would have said, " Go it while you're 
young," to the youth, but instead they said un- 
pleasant things. So he went to France and van- 
ished from the map, but he did not entirely un- 
derstand why he was banished. He had done 
nothing that other young gods did not do and he 
was amazed, but he faded. He lived in Paris 
as an exile, not as a god, and he couldn't for the 
life of him tell why. But when the war came 
he had a mighty human desire to serve his coun- 
try; just to serve, mind you, not to be exalted. 
He was fifty years old, too old to pack a rifle; 
too old to mount an airship; too old to stop a 
bullet without taking two or three other good 
men and true, younger than he, to watch him. So 
he had hard work to find service. Then along 
came the American Red Cross and it wanted 
servants — not major generals, not even captains; 
but just chauffeurs and interpreters and errand 
boys and things. And young Jimmy Hyde, who 
had been the Prince of Wales of the younger 
gods of fashionable finance, and who was cast 
out when the people changed their gods, came to 
Red Cross headquarters with his two cars, and 
offered them and himself to serve. And they 



1/2 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

put him in a uniform, with a Sam Browne belt, 
and a Red Cross on his cap ; and it was after all 
his country's uniform, and he was a servant of 
his country. And men say that even in the days 
of his young godhood he was not so happy, nor 
did his face shine in such pride as it shines today. 
For he is a man. He serves. 

After our visit to the American troops we went 
down to Domremy, the birth place of Joan of 
\ Arc. It was good to view her from the aspect 
of her Old Home Town. There is a church, re- 
stored, where she worshipped, and the home 
where she was born and lived. It was a better 
house than one is led to suppose she lived in, and 
indicates that her people were rather of more 
consequence than common. We visited the home, 
went into the church, and walked in the garden 
where she met the angel ; but we met postcard 
vendors instead. Yet it is a fair garden, back 
from the road, half hidden by a wall, and in it 
is a lovely drooping tree. A fair place it was 
indeed for an angel to choose. Some way Joan 
leaves me without much enthusiasm. Perhaps 
it is because she has had two good friends who 
have done her bad turns. The Pope, who made 
her a saint, and Mark Twain, who made her 
human. It is difficult to say, off-hand, which did 



"Our Flag Is Still There" 173 

her the worse service. Some way, it seems to 
me, she could live in our hearts more beauti- 
fully in the remote and noble company of myths 
like the lesser gods, made by men to express their 
deepest yearnings for the beautiful in life. The 
pleasant land in which she lived, the gentle hills 
whereon she watched her flocks, and the tender 
sky of France, all made me happy, and if Joan 
did not get to me, perhaps it was because one 
can take away from a place only what he brings 
there. <1 

When we left Domremy, the mills — soft 
green hills, high but never rugged, stretched 
away in the misty purple distance and we dropped 
into those vales where Joan watched her sheep 
and heard the voices. It did not seem impossible, 
nor even difficult to hear voices amid such beauty. 
So we fell to discussing the voices that reach this 
world. And Henry said: "Always there are 
voices in this earth — always they come in youth, 
calling us forward and upward. And if we fol- 
low them, though they lead to long marches and 
hard bivouacs, and to humiliation and sorrow, 
yet are we happy and triumphant." 

" But Germany? " insisted someone. " Where 
were her voices ? " 

f^TIer voices came when Heine sang, and Bee- 



174 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

thoven made music, and Goethe and Schiller 
wrote and Schopenhauer thought ! If ever a land 
had the philosophy and the poetry of democracy 
Germany had it. Democracy tried to bloom in 
the revolutionary days of the forties, but Ger- 
many strangled her voicesy And now — " 

" And now there are no voices in the world! " 
sighed one of our party; but even as he spoke 
from out of the purple distance came the thin 
faint sound of a bugle trembling among the hills. 
It was an American bugle. And Henry caught 
its significance, and cried : " There is the new 
voice — the voice that the world must follow if 
we find the old peace again on earth." 



CHAPTER V 

IN WHICH WE DISCERN THINGS *' BY THE 
dawn's early LIGHT " 

AT the close of one fair autumn day our car 
developed tire trouble, in a village " Some- 
where in France," not far from the headquarters 
of the American Army. There are four excel- 
lent reasons for deleting the name of the town. 
First, the censor might not like to have it printed ; 
second, because the name of the place has escaped 
my memory; third, because there is a munition 
factory there and it should not be mentioned, 
and fourth, because even if the name of the place 
returned to me, its spelling would get lost in 
transit. In passing it should be said in this con- 
nection that it seemed to Henry and me that the 
one thing France really needed was a pro- 
nounceable language and phonetic spelling. / The 
village where we stopped really was not a village 
in the Kansas sense; it was twice as big as Em- 
poria and nearly half as big as Wichita, which is 

175 



176 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

70,000. But the thing that made the place seem 
hke a village to us was the town crier. As we 
sat in the car he came down the street beating a 
snare drum and crying the official news of the 
sugar ration ; he was telling the people where they 
could get sugar, how much they should pay for 
it and how much they should use for each mem- 
ber of a family a month. 

" Why," asked Henry of an English speaking 
bystander, " don't you put that in your daily 
newspaper ; why keep up the old custom ? " 

" We have no daily newspaper," answered the 
inhabitant. 

" All right, then, is there any reason why the 
news won't wait for the weekly? " asked Henry. 

" And we have no weekly and no monthly and 
no annual. We have no newspaper in this 
town." 

That stumped us both. In America every town 
of five thousand has its daily newspaper, and fre- 
quently two dailies, and in the West every town 
of five hundred people has its weekly newspaper. 
With us the newspaper crystallizes public senti- 
ment, promotes local pride, and tries to be the so- 
cial and intellectual centre of the community. A 
community of twenty-five thousand without a 
newspaper — and we found that this community 




As we sat in the car he came down the street beating 

a snare drum and crying- official news of the 

sugar ration 



''By the Dawn's Early Light" 179 

never had supported a newspaper — was unthink- 
able to us in terms of any civihzation that we 
knew. How do they know about the births, 
deaths, and marriages, we asked; and they told 
us that the churches recorded those things. How 
do they know about the scandal? And we re- 
membered that scandal was older than the press ; 
it was the father of the press, as the devil is the 
father of lies. How do they know how to vote? 
And they told us that newspapers hindered rather 
than helped that function. How did they record 
local history? And in our hearts, we knew who 
had recorded so much local history, that most of 
it is not worth recording and that tradition takes 
care of what is left. But how did they manage 
to create a town spirit, to vote the bonds for the 
city waterworks, to establish the public library, 
to enforce the laws, to organize the Chamber of 
Commerce, to get up subscriptions for this, that 
or the other public benevolence ? And men shook 
their heads and said: Water has run down hill 
many years ; perhaps it will keep on running, even 
without a newspaper. 

It was a sad blow to Henry and me, who 
thought our calling was a torch-bearer of civiliza- 
tion. Indeed, one may digress and say that we 
found the whole estate of the press in France 



i8o Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

rather disenchanting. For advertising is not re- 
garded as entirely " ethical " in France. The big 
stores sometimes do not advertise at all; because 
people look with the same suspicion on advertis- 
ing drygoods and clothing merchants as we in 
America look upon advertising lawyers and doc- 
tors. So newspapers too often have to sell their 
editorial opinions, and the press has small influ- 
ence in France, compared with the influence of 
the press in what we call the Anglo-Saxon coun- 
tries^ 

But in that French village of twenty-five thou- 
sand people without a newspaper we found a 
civilization that compared favourably with the 
civilization in any American town. While the 
tire was going on it developed that a cog had 
slipped in the transgression of the car — or some- 
thing of the sort, so we were laid up for an hour, 
and we piled out of our seats and took in the 
town. We found four good bookstores therej:— 
rather larger than our bookstores at home, y We 
found two or three big co-operative stores largely 
patronized by industrial workers and farmers, and 
they were better stores by half than any co-opera- 
tive stores we had seen in America. For with us 
the co-operative store is generally a sad failure. 
Our farmers talk big about co-operation, but they 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" i8i 

sneak around and patronize the stores that offer 
the best bargains, and our industrial workers 
haven't begun iq realize how co-operative buying 
will help them. > We found no big stores, in the 
American sense, but we found many bright, well- 
kept shops. In electrical supplies we found the 
show windows up to the American average, which 
is high indeed ; but in plumbing there was a sag. 
We discovered that the town had comparatively 
few sewers. The big, white-tiled bathroom with 
its carload of modern fixtures which adorns the 
show window of at least one plumber's shop in 
every American town — we missed. The bath- 
tub is not a household need in France. Yet some 
way we surmised that if our towns could have 
better bookstores and fewer bathtubs we might 
have felt easier in our minds for the palladiums 
of our liberties. And it can't be laid to the pic- 
ture shows — this slump in the American book 
reading average ; for the French towns are just 
as full of picture shows as American towns. 
That superiority in bookstores which lies with 
the French over the Americans, should give us 
pause. It more than overbalances our superiority 
in country newspapers. And then as we walked 
about the town that evening in the sunset ponder- 
ing upon these things we came to the town park. 



1 82 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

It was not a large park; but it lay close down 
to the main street — " right in the heart of the 
city," we would say at home. Everyone in town 
who moved about, to the stores from the resi- 
dential streets, had to pass through that park. In 
it were certain long rows of grey-barked trees — 
trees with trunks that shimmered like the trunks 
of sycamores, but that rose sheer from the ground 
forty feet before branching, and then spread 
widely and calmly into mighty sprays of foliage. 
One could not walk under those trees day after 
day and year after year through life and not feel 
their spell upon his heart. " From the old grey 
trunks that mingled their mighty boughs high in 
the heaven," to those whose lives lay underneath, 
in busy and perhaps more or less sordid routine, 
must inevitably come " the thought of boundless 
power and inaccessible majesty!" And that is 
a good thought to keep in the heart. That grove 
in the midst of that little French town was worth 
more to it than sewers, more than a daily news- 
paper, more than a trolley line or a convention 
hall. For it called incessantly to men a mute 
inexorable summons to the things outside our- 
selves that make for righteousness in this earth. 
We in America, we in the everlasting Wichitas 
and Emporias, are prone to feel that we can make 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 183 

for righteousness what or when we will by call- 
ing an election, by holding a public meeting, by 
getting a president, a secretary and a committee 
on ways and means, by voting the bonds! But 
they who walk daily through groves like this, 
must in very spite of themselves give some 
thought to the hand that " reared these vener- 
able columns and that thatched the verdant 
roof ! " Now in every French town, we did not 
find a grove like this. But in every French town 
we did find something to talri its place, a his- 
toric spot marked with a beautiful stone or 
bronze ; a gently flowing river, whose beauty was 
sacredly guarded; a group of old, old buildings 
that recalled the past, a cathedral that had grown 
almost like the woods themselves, out of the vi- 
sions of men into the dreams of men. And these 
dumb teachers of men have put into the soul of 
France a fine and exquisite spirit. It rose at the 
Marne and made a miracle. 

And 'ever since the Marne that spirit has ruled 
France. Essentially it is altruistic. Men are not 
living for themselves. They are living for some- 
thing outside themselves; beyond themselves, 
even beyond the objects of their personal affec- 
tion. Men are living and dying today not for 
any immediate hope of gain for their friends or 



184 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

families, but for that organized political ,unit 
which is a spiritual thing called France, / We 
Americans who go to France are agreed that we 
have never in our lives seen anything like the 
French in this season of their anguish. They 
are treading the winepress as no other modern 
nation has trodden it, pressing their hearts' blood 
into the bitter wine of war. They grumble, of 
course, as they do their hard stint. The French 
proverbially are a nation of grumblers. Napo- 
leon took them grumbling for fifteen years to 
glory. He took them grumbling to Moscow, and 
brought them grumbling back. They grumbled 
under the Second Empire and into the Republic. 
In 19 1 6 they all but grumbled themselves into 
revolution. One heard revolt whispered in a 
thousand places. But they did not revolt. They 
will not revolt. Grumbling is a mere outer man- 
nerism. In their hearts they are brave. 

Over and over again as we went about France 
were we impressed with the courage and the 
tenacity of the French. By very contrast with 
their eternal grumbling did these traits seem to 
loom large and definite and certain. We met 
Dorothy Canfield in Paris, one of the best of the 
younger American novelists. She told us a most 
illuminating story. She has been two years in 



''By the Dawns Early Light" 185 

France working with the blind, and later super- 
intending the commissary department of a train- 
ing camp for men in the American Field Ambu- 
lance service. She is a shrewd and wise ob- 
server, with a real sense of humour, and Heaven 
knows a sense of humour is necessary if one gets 
the truth out of the veneer of tragedy that sur- 
faces the situation.^ It seems that she was riding 
into Paris from her training camp recently, and 
being tired went to sleep in her compartment, in 
which were two civilians, too old for military 
service. She was awakened by a wrangle and 
then — but let her tell it : 

" Then I saw a couple of poilus sticking their 
heads in our window shaking a beret and asking 
for contributions to help them enjoy their week's 
leave of absence in Paris. My two elderly 
Frenchmen had given a little, under protest, say- 
ing (what was perfectly true) that it would go 
for drink and wouldn't do the poilus any good. 
And one of the soldiers was declaiming about the 
fat bourgeois who stayed at home and let him- 
self be defended and then wouldn't give a help- 
ing hand to the poor soldier on rest leave! To 
get rid of them, I put a franc in the beret. This 

1 This story appeared in Everybody's Magazine in 
Dorothy Canfield's own words. 



1 86 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

was received with acclamations, and they in- 
quired to whom should they drink a toast with 
the money. I said, * Oh, give a good Vive 
r Amerique. That'll suit me best ! ' They both 
shouted, ' Oh, is Madame an American ? ' And 
to the dismay of the two bourgeois, put first one 
long leg and then another through the window 
and came in noisily to sit down (they were stand- 
ing on the running-board all this time with the 
train going forty miles an hour ... a thing 
which was simply unheard-of in France before 
the war . . . one of the ' privileges ' which the 
poilu take!). Well, they shook hands with me 
two or three times over and assured me they had 
never seen an American before . . . and indeed 
the two bourgeois looked at me curiously. Then 
one of them began to talk boisterously, express- 
ing himself with great fluency and occasionally 
with a liberty of phrase which wasn't conventional 
at all, another poilu privilege! They sat down, 
evidently for a long visit. They were typical 
specimens: one was noisy, fluent, slangy, coarse, 
quite eloquent at times, a real Parisian of the 
lower classes, the kind which leaves its shirt open 
at the neck over a hairy chest and calls itself 
proudly ' the proletariat.' The other was a fresh- 
faced, vigorous country man from Bourgogne, 




They were, standing on the running board all this time 
with the train going forty miles an hour 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 189 

the type that corresponds to the middle western 
American, a kind of Emporian ! He hadn't 
much to say, but when he did speak, spoke to the 
purpose. They both, through all their rough- 
ness and coarseness and evident excitement over 
starting on their * permission,' had that French 
instinctive social tact and amenity (of a sort) 
which keeps decent women from being afraid of 
them or from hesitating to talk with them; and 
they were both very sincere, and desperately try- 
ing to express something of the strange confu- 
sion that is in everybody's mind ever since the 
war . . . what are we all doing anyhow ! 

" Here are some of the things the fluent Paris 
* cockney ' said . . . for the type corresponds in 
Paris to the lower-class cockney of London. 

" * See here, you know, we've had enough of 
it ... we can't stand it any more! I'm just 
back from the Chemin des Dames . . . you know 
what that's been for the last month ' . . . then 
he gave me a terrible description of that battle 
. . . ' how do you expect men to go back to that 
... do you know what happens to you when you 
live for twenty-thirty days like that? . . . 
you go mad! Yes, that's what happens to you 
. . . that's what's the trouble with me now . . . 
I know I sound wild. I am wild . . . I can't 



190 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

stand any more . . . it's more than flesh and 
blood can endure to go back into that! Why 
don't the Americans get in it if they are going 
to? Oh, yes, I know they can't any sooner . . . 
but why didn't they get in, before! Oh, yes, I 
know why. I know . . . but when you are mad 
you can't stop to reason. We look at it this 
way. . . . When we're not mad, from having 
been too many days under fire ... we say, as 
we talk it over. . . . There are the English . . . 
they've done splendidly . . . they've taken two 
years, it is true, to get their army really in shape 
. . . but they didn't have anything to begin with 
. . . they're fine ... all that we could expect. 
But all the same, during the two years. French- 
men were dying like flies , . . just watering the 
whole North with blood . . . yes, I've seen a 
brook run red just like the silly poems that no- 
body believed. And the Americans . . . yes 
. . . suppose this man and I should get to quar- 
relling. Of course you can't jump right in and 
decide which is to blame, if you don't know much 
about the beginning. You have to stand off and 
watch, and see which fights fair, and all the rest 
. . . hut while you are deciding, all France is 
dying. It is time the weight of the defence is 
taken off France . . . there won't be any French- 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 191 

men left alive in France . . . and here she is 
with all these foreigners over-running her! Do 
you suppose they are going to leave after the 
war? Not much. All these Algerians and 
Senegals and Anamites — not to speak of the 
Belgians and English and Americans . . . there 
won't be any Frenchmen left alive, and France 
will be populated by foreigners , . . that's what 
we have to look forward to for all the reward of 
our blood. They keep promising help, but they 
don't bring it. We have to go back and go back ! 
I tell you, Ma'ame, three years is too long a time! 
No man can stand three years of war ! It makes 
you into somebody else . . . you've died so many 
times you're like a walking corpse . . . isn't that 
just how you feel ? ' he appealed to his compan- 
ion, who said impassively, 

" ' No, damn you, that isn't a bit how I feel. 
I just say to myself, '' It's war," and " That's 
the way war is," and I don't try to make anything 
out of it the way you do. That's silly! You 
just have to stick it out. Understanding it hasn't 
anything to do with it.' 

" The first one went o£f on another tack . . . 
still wilder and more incoherent. ' It's the capi- 
talists . . . that's what it is . . . they saw that 
the people . . . the proletariat . . . that's me,' 



192 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

with a thump of his fist on his chest, ' had begun 
to see too clearly how things were going and so 
they stirred up this hornet's nest to blind every- 
body . . . for in w^ar even more than in peace 
(and that's saying a good deal) . . . it's the 
proletariat that bears the burdens. Who do you 
think is in the trenches now ... is the bourgeois 
class? No! It's the labouring class. One by 
one, the bourgeois have slipped out of it. Got 
themselves the fat jobs at the rear, work in hos- 
pitals ... anything but to stay out in the front- 
line trenches with us poor rats of working-peo- 
ple ! Isn't that so ? ' 

" He appealed to his companion, who answered 
again very calmly ( it was extraordinary how they 
didn't seem to mind differing diametrically from 
each other. I suppose they had the long habit of 
arguing together). 'No, it's not so! In my 
company there are as many bourgeois as labour- 
ing men.' 

" The first man never paid the least attention 
to these brief denials of everything he was saying. 
' It's the proletariat that always pays . . . isn't 
it so, Ma'ame ! Peace or war, old times or new, 
it's always the poor who pay all the debts ! And 
they're doing it to such a tune now in France that 
there won't be any left, when the war is over . . . 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 193 

oh, it's got to stop. There's no use talking about 
it . . . and it will, too, one of these days . . . 
who cares how it stops! Life . . . any sort of 
Hfe . . . is better than anything else.' 

" At this the other soldier said, ' Don't pay any 
attention to him, Madame, he always goes on so 
. . . but he'll stick it out just the same. We all 
will. That's the nature of the Frenchman, 
Madame. He must have his grievance. He 
must grumble and grumble but when it's neces- 
sary, he goes forward just the same. . . . Only 
he has to talk such a lot before ! ' 

" ' Oh, yes, we'll hold them, fast enough ! ' 
agreed the first one. ' We'll never let them get 
past us! ' (This type of declaring poilu is much 
given to contradicting himself flatly ! ) ' But 
never, never, never an offensive again, from the 
French . . . you see, Madame — Never again 
an ofifensive from the French! They've done 
their share ! They've done more than their share. 
Never an offensive. We'll hold till the Ameri- 
cans get here, but not more ! ' 

" We were pulling into the station at Meaux 
by this time, and as the train stood there waiting, 
I heard a sound that brought my heart up into my 
mouth . . . the sound of a lot of young men's 
voices singing an American College song! 



194 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

Everybody sprang to the windows and there was 
a group of American boys, in their nice new uni- 
forms, singing at the tops of their voices, and 
putting their heads together like a college glee- 
club. Their clear young voices completely filled 
that great smoky station and rang out with the 
most indescribably confident inspiriting effect! 
* Good God ! ' cried the dingy, battered soldier at 
my elbow, ' how little they know what they are 
going into ! ' The soldier from Bourgogne said 
nothing, but looked very stern and sad. The con- 
trast between those two men, one so rebellious, 
the other so grimly enduring, both so shabby and 
war-worn, and those splendidly fresh boys out- 
side, seemed to me the most utterly symbolic 
episode imaginable. There was America — there 
was France. 

" It changed the current of the talk. After 
that we talked all together, the two bourgeois 
joining in . . . sober talk enough, of probabili- 
ties and hopes and fears. 

" As I walked home at one o'clock in the morn- 
ing through the silent black streets of Paris, turn- 
ing over and over what that poor disinherited 
slum-dweller had said as we parted, quite as 
earnestly and simply as he had poured out all his 
disgust and revolt, ' Good-bye, Ma'ame, I never 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 195 

met an American before. I hope I'll meet many 
more. You tell the Americans the French will 
see it through ... if a new offensive is neces- 
sary . . . we'll do it! It's the only chance any- 
body has to have a world fit to live in ! ' " ' 

When she had finished her story, Dorothy 
Canfield concluded something like this : " That's 
what they all come back to, after their fit of utter 
horror at their life is over. It does them good, 
apparently, to talk it all out to a patient listener. 
They always, always end by saying that even what 
they are living through is better than a world com- 
manded by the Germans . . . what a perfectly 
amazing distrust that nation has accumulated 
against itself ! " 

They are sick of war; war weary and sad. 
Yet they will fight on. The will to fight is out- 
side the individual will; yet it is not the will of 
the leaders, nor is it the will of the many com- 
bined in a common will. For the many are tired 
unto death of war. But for all that they will 
fight on without flinching. It is the national will 
— the will deeper than the will of leaders, 
stronger than the molten will of the many in one 
purpose. It is the tradition of centuries ; it is the 
unexpressed purpose, perhaps unconscious habit 
of an old, old people, united far down in the 



196 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

roots of them ; not so much by race, for the 
Franks are of many breeds; not so much by in- 
dustrial or geographical ties or even political 
unity, though it approaches that ; but bound most 
surely by the sense of national tradition. A peo- 
ple is fighting. From a thousand villages with' 
their primeval temples, with their lovely cathe- 
drals grown out of the hearts of the race buried 
in the shadow of their spires, from the shining 
rivers that flow through green pastures, from soft 
hills rich in folk tales of heroes, come the mil- 
lions ; and from Paris, ever radiant in her vener- 
able youth, come other millions who make this 
fighting soul of the nation. What if it grumbles 
as it fights ; it will still fight on. Of course it is 
sick of war; but it will not stop. It is a spirit 
that is fighting in France, the spirit of a brave 
people. 

We have in France a few hundred thousand 
men and will soon have a million and more v/ho 
are offering their lives in Service. But the whole 
French nation is giving thus. And it is without 
hate. 1 One finds instead of hatred in France a 
feeling of deep disgust for the German and all 
his works. The spirit of the French is not 
vicious. It is beautiful. When the war ceases 
that may subside, may retire to the under con- 



" By the Dawn's Early Light " 197 

sciousness of the people. But it will not depart. 
It also will remain eternally a part of the salvage 
of this war. I 

By the time the transgression of our car had 
been sufficiently atoned for, dusk was falling. 
And Henry broke away from the gothic arches 
of the trees and made for a tavern. He had 
learned that one must take food in France where 
he can find it, and ten minutes later we came upon 
him in front of the inn, talking in a slow loud 
voice to what was either the inn-keeper's daughter 
or his pretty young wife thus : " I said," Henry 
paused and nodded his head and beat the thing 
in with his hand ; " we want some supper — de 
jurnay — toot sweet ! " She shook her head and 
shrugged her shoulders very prettily and said she 
could not "say pa." And Henry laughed and 
went on, still enunciating each word distinctly. 
" Ah, don't tell us you can't ' Say pa ' : say ' wee 
wee.' " And again he told her " toot sweet." 
That was the only part of the French language 
that Henry was entirely sure of — that and 
" comb be-ah ! " But we could not get it through 
her head. So we loaded ourselves into the car 
and headed back for St. Dizier, where at least 
they understood Henry's gestures, and we could 
get food! 



198 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

Our next journey took us to the greatest train- 
ing camp in the alHed part of the world. It is 
not the largest camp, of course. It accommo- 
dates less than twenty thousand soldiers. But it 
is what might be called the post graduate college 
of all training camps. Here ten thousand men 
come every week from other training camps all 
over the earth, and are given intensive training. 
For six days, eighteen and twenty hours a day, 
these soldiers, trained by many months' labour on 
other fields, are given the Ph.D. in battle lore,^ 
and are turned out the^yenth day after a Sat- ^ 
urday night lecture on hate, and shot straight up 
to the front. In all France there is no more 
grisly place for the weak-stomached man than 
this training camp — not even the front line 
trenches will kick up his gorge more sedulously. 
Yet at first sight the place looks innocent enough. 
One sees a great basin hollowed among the hills, 
and in the ten thousand acre plain one sees horse- 
men galloping, soldiers running, great trucks and 
tanks lumbering over the field ; men digging, men 
throwing hand-grenades, men clambering over 
trench walls, stumbling over crater holes, men 
doing all the innumerable things that are learned 
by those who carry on the handicraft of war. 

But when one starts with the first class and 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 199 

goes along through the day's work with it, the 
deadly seriousness of the training gets to him. 
The first thing the first class does is to gather 
around a sergeant major, who in a few simple 
words tells his pupils how to use the bayonet. 
Then they go out and use the bayonet as he has 
taught them. Then the pupils gather around an- 
other sergeant major, who tells them how to usq 
the hand-grenade or the knife or the butt of a | 
gun, and the simple-hearted lads go out and use 
the grenade, the knife, or the butt of the gun. 
At length they are taken to a part of the ground 
where some trenches are sunken in the earth. 
Before the trenches are barbed wire entangle- 
ments and deep jagged shell craters. The imita- 
tion enemy trenches badly bombed by barrage 
lie twenty rods beyond. The men are taken 
in hand by the amiable sergeant major and taught 
to yell and roar, and growl and snarl, to simulate 
the most murderous passion, and the simulation 
of a husky youth in his twenties of a murderous 
passion is realistic enough to make your flesh 
creep; for the very simulation produces the pas- 
sion, as every wise man's son doth know. Then 
the youths are lined up in the trench, and num- 
bered " one-two ; one-two ; one-two " ; clear down 
the trench. Then the order is given to go over 



200 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

the top. Every gun rattles on the trench-top, 
and the second lieutenant goes over. In the Eng- 
lish papers the list of dead begins " Second lieu- 
tenant, unless otherwise designated." And in 
the war zone the second lieutenants are known 
as " The suicides' club." Well, the second lieu- 
tenants get on top, and, down in the trench, num- 
ber one hands his leg to number two ; clear down 
the line; number two boosts number one to tlie 
top, then number one lends a hand to number two 
and pulls him out. Meanwhile enemy fire is hot. 
The line forms in open order. The blood cur- 
dling yells begin — and mingle in an animal roar 
that sounds like the howl of an orang-outang in 
the circus just before it is fed at the after-show! 
It is the voice of hell. Then the line walks — 
not runs, but walks under machine gun and shell 
fire to the enemy trench; for experience has 
proven that if the men run into that fire they 
will be out of breath and probably go down in 
the hand-to-hand, kriee-to-knee, eye-to-eye con- 
flict with knife and bayonet and gun butt that 
always occurs when they go over the top to 
charge the enemy trench. As they near the 
enemy trench the bestial howl rises, and as they 
jump into the shell-shattered trenches the howl 
is maniacal. In the trenches are canvas bags 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 201 

made to represent wounded enemies. The first 
wave over the top leaves these bags for the 
stretcher bearers. But by the time the next wave 
comes over, or the third wave comes, the stretcher 
bearers are supposed to have cleared the trenches 
of wounded enemies, and after that every soldier 
is supposed to jab his bayonet in every bag in 
the trenches, as he is expected to jab every dead 
body, to prevent an enemy from playing possum 
and then getting to a presumably disabled enemy 
machine gun and shooting our soldiers in the 
back. Every time a student soldier jabs a canvas 
bag he snarls and growls like a jackal, and if he 
misses a bag it counts against him in the day's 
markings. Wave after wave comes over, and 
prisoners are sent to the rear, if there are guards 
to take them. If not prisoners are killed, and one 
does not waste ammunition on them. It may be 
well to pause here to say that in the gentle art 
of murdering the business of taking prisoners is 
not elaborately worked out. They learn that by 
rote, rather than by note. The Canadians, since 
two of their men were crucified by the Prussians, 
take few Prussian prisoners. Here is a snap- 
back of the film. It is the Rue di Rivoli in Paris. 
Two lanky youngsters in Canadian uniform are 
talking to Henry and me. 



202 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

" What part of the states do you Canadians 
come from ? " we ask. They grin and answer, 
" San Francisco." 

We : " What's this story about you Canadians 
not taking any prisoners? " 

They : " Oh, we take prisoners — all right, 
I guess ! " 

We: "Well, how often?" 

They : " Oh, sometimes." 

We: "Come on now, boys, as Calif ornians 
to Kansans, tell us the truth." 

The tall one looked at the short one for per- 
mission to tell the truth, and got it. Then he 
said : 

" Well, it's like this. We go into a trench 
after them damn brutes has been playing machine 
guns on us, knowing as soon as we get in they'll 
surrender, but trying to kill as many of us as they 
can before they give up. Then they raise up 
their hands and begin yelling, * Kamerade, 
Kamerade,' and someone says, * Come on, fellers, 
let's take this poor buggar,' and we're about to do 
it when along comes a chap and sees this devil, 
and up goes a gun by the barrel, and whack it 
comes down on the Boche's head, and the feller 
says, * No, damn him, he killed my pal,' and we 




What part of the States do you Canadians 
from ? " 



come 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 205 

polishes him off ! polishes him off and cleans out 
the trench." 

We: " Now, boys, does that always happen? 
How often do you fellows polish Fritzie oft' and 
clean up the trench? " 

They (after the short one had nodded to the 
tall one) : " Well, mister, I'll tell you. It's got 
so it's mighty damn risky for any Prussian to sur- 
render to any Canadian ! " 

When the line out there in the training camp 
has gone to its objective, which usually is the 
third or fourth enemy trench, the men begin dig- 
ging in. Then they go back to the sergeant 
major for more instructions. The digging in is 
usually done under a curtain of fire to protect 
them. It is a great picture. 

In another part of the field we saw the engi- 
neers learning to make tunnels under the enemy ; 
saw the engineers blowing up enemy trenches — 
a pleasant and exciting spectacle; saw the engi- 
neers making camouflage, and it may interest the 
gentle reader to know that one of the niftiest 
bits of camouflage we saw was over a French 
seventy-five gun. It was set in the field. A rail- 
road siding ran to it. On a canvas over the gun 
two rails and the usual number of ties were 



2o6 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

painted, and the track ran on beyond. Fifty 
feet in the air one could not tell that the gun was 
there. 

The liveliest part of this martial cloister was 
the section devoted to the bayonet practice. And 
as we watched the men trying to rip the vest but- 
tons off a dummy and expose its gastric arrange- 
ments with a bayonet, while loping along at full 
speed, we recalled a Civil War story which may 
well be revived here. A Down-easter from Ver- 
mont and a Southerner were going around and 
around one day at Shiloh, each trying to get the 
other with the bayonet, but both were good 
dodgers. Finally as the Yankee was getting 
winded he cried between puffs : 

" Watch aout — ! Mind what yer dewin' ! 
Ye dern smart aleck! Haint yew got no sense! 
You'll stick the pint of thet thing in my boawels, 
if you ain't keerful! " 

We heard a lot of shivery stories around that 
training camp. They told us that the French 
chasseurs, the famous blue devils, were more or 
less careless about the way they forgot to take 
prisoners. They are a proud people, from the 
French Alps, and exceedingly democratic. A 
German brigadier, caught under their barrage, 
came up to a troop of chasseurs and when they 



" By the Dawn's Early Light " 207 

demanded his surrender asked curtly, " Where's 
your superior officer? " They pointed down the 
hill, and he started down. At a safe distance 
they threw a hand grenade into him and obliter- 
ated him, remarking, " Well, the world is that 
much safer for democracy." It is told of a Ca- 
nadian who came across a squad of Germans with 
their hands up that he asked : " How many are 
you?" Eleven, they said. He reached in his 
pocket; found his hand grenade, and threw it 
at them, remarking, " I'm sorry I have but the 
one ; but divide it between you ! " There is also 
the story of the Indian Sikhs, who begged to go 
out on a night raiding party — crawling on their 
bellies with their knives as their only weapons. 
Finally two of them returned with new pairs of 
boots. Showing them proudly to their amazed 
Captain, they said humbly, " Yes, sire ! But you 
would be pained to learn how long we had to 
hunt for a fit ! " There is also the story of the 
festive Tommy who tried to play a practical joke 
on his German prisoner by slipping a lighted bomb 
in the German's pocket. The Tommy then 
started to run ; the German thought he must keep 
up with his captor and Tommy realized that the 
joke was on him, just as the bomb went off and 
killed them both. 



2o8 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

Such stories are innumerable. They are prob- 
ably untrue. But they indicate what men at war 
think is funny ; they reflect a certain impoliteness 
and lack of courtesy that prevails in war. As it 
wears on it grows more or less unneighbourly. 

I And yet the upheaval of war is just a passing 
emotional disturbance in the normal life of men. 
Even in France, even in the war zone, there is no 
glorifying of war ; men in war, at least on our side 
of the line, hate war more than they hate the Ger- 
mans. And with the whole heart of the civilized 
world — if one frankly may call the Turk and the 
Prussian the savages that they are — set upon 

. maintaining this war to a victory for the allies, 
civilization may be said to be in the war as a make- 

' shift. Everywhere one hears that it is a war 
against war. Every one is " longing for the dawn 
of peace " when it shall come with justice, and in 
the meantime France is as deeply devoted to heal- 
ing the wounds of war as it is in promoting the 
war .J Six hundred French societies are devoted to 
various war works of mercy! Every man and 
woman in France who is not a soldier or a nurse 
is working in one of these societies. And yet 
life goes on with all this maladjustment of its 
cams and cogs and levers much as in its ordi- 
nary routine. There never were more joyous 



" By the Dawn's Early Light " 209 

dahlias and phlox and china asters than we saw 
coming back from that training camp where men 
were learning the big death game. And when we 
came to Paris the real business of war seemed 
remote. Of course, Paris is affected by the war. 
But Paris is not war-hke. One doesn't associate 
Paris with " grim-visaged war ! " For if Paris 
is not gay, still it remains mighty amiable. At 
noon the boulevard cafes are filled to the side- 
walks, and until nine o'clock at night they give a 
fair imitation of their former happiness. Then 
they close and the picture shows are crowded, and 
the theaters are filled. One sees soldiers and their 
women folk at the opera and at the vaudeville 
shows more than at the other shows. During 
the summer and the autumn a strong man put on 
a show at the Follies with the soldiers that was 
the talk of the town. His game was a tug of 
war. He announced that he would give fifty dol- 
lars to any soldier who could withstand him. 
The strong man sat the soldier down on the floor, 
foot to foot before him. Both grasped a pole, 
and it was the strong man's " act " to throw the 
soldier over his head, on to a mattress just back 
of the strong man. It is a simple act; one that 
soon would tire Broadway, but when one remem- 
bers that soldiers bring their local pride with them 



2IO Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

to Paris from the ends of the earth, from New 
Zealand, from India, from Canada, from South 
Africa, from Morocco, from China, from Aus- 
traHa, and then when one remembers that the 
men of his country are gathered in the theater 
to back every local athlete, it is easy to see why 
the strong man holds week after week, month 
after month, season after season. Every night 
some proud nation gathers in the show house to 
get that fifty dollars with its favourite son. And 
every night some favourite son almost gets it. 
And if the strong man didn't fudge a little, pinch 
the favourite son's hands on the pole and make 
him let go, almost every night the strong man 
would be worsted. The struggle sets the house 
yelling. It is the only real drama in Paris. We 
noticed that the shows of Paris which appealed 
to the eyes and ears were far below the American 
standard. In comedy which appeals to some- 
thing behind the sense, in the higher grades of 
acting, the Paris shows were, on the whole, better 
than Broadway shows. But in the choruses, the 
dancers lack that finish, that top dressing of me- 
chanical unison required by American taste. 
Moreover the lighting and colour were poor. 
The music at the Follies was Victor Herbert 
of 191 1 ! Old American popular songs seemed 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 211 

to be in vogue. One heard " O Johnny " and 
" Over There " at every vaudeville house this 
year. Sometimes they were done in French, 
sometimes in English. In Genoa, one may say 
in passing that we heard one of the songs from 
" Hitchy-Coo " done in Italian. It v^as eery! 
American artists are popular in Paris. We saw a 
girl at three show houses in Paris, under the name 
of Betty Washington, doing a gipsy dance, play- 
ing the fiddle. She was barefoot, and Henry, 
who has a keen eye, noticed that she had her toes 
rouged! But she always was good for four en- 
cores, and she usually got a good start at the 
fifth from Henry and me; we had just that much 
national pride! Great throngs of soldiers filled 
these gay show houses. The French, the Eng- 
lish, and the Australians seemed satisfied with 
them. But the Canadians and Americans sniffed. 
To them Paris is a poor show town. 

One night we fell into a Boulevard show the 
like of which we had never seen before. It was 
a political revue! The whole evening was de- 
voted to skits directed at the ministry, at the food 
administration, at the scandals in the interior 
department and the deputies, at the high taxes 
and the profiteering of the munition makers. 
The skits were done in dialogue, song and dance. 



212 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

and the various forms of burlesque. A good 
crowd — but not a soldier crowd — sat through 
it and applauded appreciatively. Imagine an 
American audience devoting a whole evening to 
a theatrical performance exclusively concerned 
with Hoover, Secretary Daniels, Colonel Roose- 
velt, former Mayor Mitchel, and LaFollette. In 
America we get little politics out of the theater. 
In France, where they distrust the newspapers, 
they get much politics from the theater. The 
theater is free in France — and apparently not 
so closely censored as the newspapers. We 
learned that night at the revue of a coming cabi- 
net crisis, before the newspapers announced it. 
And in learning of the crisis we had this curious 
social experience, which we modestly hoped was 
quite as Parisian as the Revue. During the first 
act of the show it was Greek to Henry and me. 
We could understand a vaudeville show, and by 
following the synopsis could poke along after the 
pantomime in a comedy. But here in this revue, 
where the refinements of sarcasm and satire were 
at play and that without a cue, we were stumped. 
Henry was for getting out and going somewhere 
else. But we had a dollar a seat in the show and 
it seemed to me that patience would bring results. 
And it did ! A good-looking, middle-aged couple 



"By the Dazvns Early Light" 213 

sat down in the seats next to us, and the woman 
began talking English. She was sitting next to 
me, so it was my turn, not Henry's to speak. 
We asked her if it would be too much trouble to 
interpret the show for two jays from Middle 
Western America. She replied cordially enough. 
And she gave us a splendid running interpreta- 
tion of the show. The man with her seemed 
friendly. We noticed that he was slyly holding 
her hand in the dark, and that once he slipped his 
arm around her when the lights went clear down. 
But that spelled a newly married middle-aged 
couple, and we would have bet money that he 
was a widower and she, late from his office, was 
at the head of his household. Between acts he 
and Henry went out to smoke, leaving me with 
the lady. We exchanged confidences of one sort 
and another after the manner of strangers in a 
strange land. When it occurred to me to ask: 
"What does your husband do for a living?" 

" My — what ? " she exclaimed. 

" Your husband, there? " 

" Who — that man ? Why, I never saw him 
in my life until I picked him up in a cafe an hour 
ago!" 

And she got from me a somewhat gaspy 
" Oh." But we had a good chat just the same 



214 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

and she told me all about the coming fall of the 
cabinet. Her type in America would not be in- 
terested in politics. But the shows of the boule- 
vards discuss politics and the theaters are free! 
So her type in France had to know politics. \ rt 
takes all kinds of people and also all kinds of 
peoples to make a world. And the war really is 
being fought so that they may work out their 
lives and their national traditions freely and after 
the call of their own blood. If we are to have 
only one kind of people, the kind is easy to find. 
There is kultur !| 

Still the love affairs of the French did bother 
us. Henry did not mind them so much; but to 
me they seemed as unreasonable and as improba- 
ble as the ocean and onion soup seemed to Henry. 
Every man has his aversion, and the French idea 
of separating love from marriage, and establish- 
ing it beautifully in another relation, is my aver- 
sion, and it will have to stand. Henry was pa- 
tient with me, but we were both genuinely glad 
when a day or two later we came back to the 
sprightly little American love affair that we had 
chaperoned on the Espagne crossing the ocean. 
That love affair we could understand. It had 
been following us with a feline tenacity all over 
France. When we left the Eager Soul with the 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 215 

Gilded Youth in the hospital at — we'll say Lan- 
drecourt, because that is not the place — we 
thought our love affair was gone for ever. The 
letter she gave us to deliver to the Young Doctor 
we had to trust to other hands; for he was not 
at the American hospital where he should have 
been. He had gone to the British front for a 
week's experimental work in something with four 
syllables and a Latin name at that. But the cat 
came back one day, when we were visiting a 
hospital four hours out of Paris. The place had 
that curious French quality of charm about it, 
which we Americans do not manage to put into 
our " places and palaces." Down a winding vil- 
lage street — a kind of low-walled stone canyon, 
narrow and grey, but brightened with uniforms 
like the streets of most French villages these 
days — we wormed our machine and stopped at 
an important looking building — an official look- 
ing building. It was not official, we learned — 
just a chateau. A driveway ran under it. That 
got us. For when a road leads into a house in 
America, it means a jail, or a courthouse, or a 
hotel, or a steel magnate's home or a department 
store. But when we scooted under the house we 
came into a wide white courtyard, gravel paved. 
We left the machine and went from the court- 



2i6 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

yard into a garden — the loveliest old walled gar- 
den imaginable. At the corners of the garden 
were fine old trees — tall, spike-shaped ever- 
greens of some variety, and in the midst of it was 
a weeping yew tree and a fountain. Around the 
walls were shrubs and splashed about the walks 
and near the fountain were gorgeous dabs of 
colour, phlox and asters, and dahlias and holly- 
hocks and flowers of various gay sorts. And 
back of the garden, down a shaded path, lay the 
hospital — a new modern barracks of a hospital, 
in a field sheltered from the street by all that 
grandeur and all that beauty. The hospital was 
made of rough, brown stained boards ; it was one 
story high, built architecturally like a tannery, 
and camouflaged as to the roof to represent 
" green fields and running brooks." Board floors 
and board partitions under the roof were covered 
as well as they could be ; and stoves furnished the 
heat. The beds — acres and acres of iron beds 
— were assembled in the great wards and 
stretched far down the long rooms like white 
ranks of skeletoned ghosts. The place was 
American — new, excruciatingly clean, and was 
run like a factory. We were proud of it, and 
of the business-like young medical students who 
as orderlies and bookkeepers and helpers went 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 217 

about in their brand new uniforms — young 
crown princes of democracy, twice as handsome 
and three times as dignified as they would have 
been if they had royal blood. Henry called them 
the heirs apparent "of all the ages " and enjoyed 
them greatly. They certainly gave the place a 
tone, converting a sprawling ugly pile of brown 
boards into a king's palace. When we had fin- 
ished our errand at the hospital and were return- 
ing through the garden, we met our young doctor. 
He was sitting on an old stone bench, among 
the asters and dahlias — wounded. It was not a 
serious wound from an ordinary man's stand- 
point ; but from the Young Doctor's it was grave 
indeed. For it was a bullet wound through his 
hand. He thought it would not affect the mus- 
cles permanently — but no one could know. 
Then he sat there in the mediaeval garden among 
the flowers under the yew trees and told us how 
it happened; took us out to the first aid post 
again, and on out to the first line trenches, and 
over them into No Man's Land, stumbling over 
the dead, helping the stretcher bearers with the 
wounded. In time he came to a wounded Ger- 
man — a Prussian officer with a shell-wound in 
his leg. 

He told us what happened, impersonally, as 



2i8 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

one who is listening to another man's story in his 
own mouth. " I gave him something like a first 
aid to stop the bleeding," the young Doctor 
paused, picked a ravelling from his bandage and 
went on, still detached from the narrative. 
" Then I put my arm around him, to help him 
back to the ambulance." Again he hesitated and 
said quietly, " That was a half mile back and the 
shells were still popping — more or less — around 
us." He looked for appreciation of the situation. 
He got it, smiled and went on without lifting his 
voice. " Then he did it." 

"Not that fellow?" exclaimed Henry. 

" Well, how? " from me. 

" Oh, I don't know. He just did it," droned 
the Young Doctor. " We were talking along ; 
and then he seemed to quit talking. I looked up. 
The pistol was at my head; I knocked it away 
as he fired. It got my hand ! " He stopped, be- 
gan poking the gravel with his toe, and smiled 
again as one who has heard an old story and 
wants to be polite. To Henry and me, it was 
unbelievable. We sat down on the hoary, moss- 
covered curb of the ancient fountain regardless 
of our spanking new uniforms and cried : " Well, 
my Heavenly home ! " He nodded, drew a deep 
breath and said, " That's the how of it." 




He told us what happened impersonally as one who is 
listening to another man's story in his own mouth 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 221 

"Well, what do you know about — " 

Then Henry checked me with, " You weren't 
expecting it? Did he make no warning sign?" 

"Not a peep — not a chirrup," answered the 
Doctor, still diffidently. Then he added, as one 
reflecting over an incident in a rather remote 
past : " It was odd, wasn't it. You would 
think that two men who stood where we were 
together — I, who had put my hands in his live 
flesh, and had felt his blood flow through my fin- 
gers, and he who was clinging to my body for 
support — you would think we had come together 
not as foes, but as friends ; for the war was over 
for him!" 

The Young Doctor's eyebrows knitted. His 
mouth set. He went on : " This man should have 
abandoned his military conscience. But no — ," 
the Doctor shook his head sadly, " he was a Prus- 
sian before he was a man ! He carefully figured 
it out, that it takes four years to make a doctor, 
and three months to make a soldier, so to kill a 
doctor is as good as killing a dozen men. It's 
all very scientific, this German warfare — scien- 
tific and fanatical ; Nietzsche and Mahomet, what 
a perfect alliance it is between the Kaiser and 
th5_^ultan." 
\ Then it came to us again that Germans, on seas, 



-222 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

in submarines, in air, in their planes bombing 
hospitals, and on land, looting and dynamiting 
villages — in all their martial enterprises, think 
unlike the rest of civilized men. They are a 
breed apart — savage, material-minded, diabolic, 
unrestrained by fear or love of God, man or 
devil. We talked of these things for a time; 
but something, the quiet beauty of the garden 
maybe, took the edge off our hate. And gradu- 
ally it became apparent to me, at least, that the 
Young Doctor was marking time until we should 
have the sense to tell him something of the Eager 
Soul. What did he care for the war? For the 
Prussians? For their Babylonian philosophy? 
For his wounded hand? What were gardens 
made for in this drab earth, if not for sanctu- 
aries of lovers? One does not go to a garden to 
hate, to buy, or sell, to fight, to philosophize, but 
to adore something or someone, somehow or 
somewhere. And the Young Doctor was in his 
Holy Temple, and we knew it. So Henry asked : 
" You received your letter ? " And when he 
thanked us for our trouble, Henry asked again: 
" Did she tell you that the Gilded Youth was there 
at her hospital? " 

" Only in a pencilled postscript after she had 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 223 

decided to send the letter to me by you," an- 
swered the Doctor. 

That sounded good to me. Evidently she had 
written to the Young Doctor before the Gilded 
Youth had appeared. Also presumably she had 
not written to the Gilded Youth. If she had writ- 
ten to him after the air raid that had killed the 
head nurse, it would indicate that she had turned 
to the Young Doctor, in an emotional crisis, and 
that he was still a safe bet, as against the Gilded 
Youth. The only question which occurred to 
me to develop this fact was this : " Did she 
tell you that she was made assistant to the new 
head nurse that came to supply the place of the 
one who was slain by the Germans ? " Henry 
looked at me as if he thought the question was 
unfair. 

" Yes," laughed the Doctor, " in the very first 
line." 

" What odds are you giving now. Bill ? " asked 
Henry bitterly. 

" In the very first line, — " we could all three 
see the Eager face, the proud blue eyes, the pretty 
effective hands brushing the straying crinkly 
strands of red hair from her forehead, as she 
sat there in the bare little nurses' room, bringing 



224 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

her first promotion in pride to the young Doctor. 
Perhaps he did not realize all that it meant. For 
you see he was very young. Certainly he did not 
understand about the odds and repeated the word 
in a question. Henry cut in, " Oh, nothing, only 
that night after they went walking in the hospital 
yard, Bill made me give him three to five. Now 
I ought to have two to one. It's all oyer but the 
shouting." And Henry laughed at the Young 
Doctor's bewilderment; but the young Doctor 
looked at his bandaged hand and shook his head. 
The walk in the hospital yard was disturbing news 
to him. 

" Ah, don't worry about that," Henry reassured 
him, " Why, man, you ought to have heard what 
she said about you ! " And Henry, being a good- 
natured sort, told the Doctor what the Eager Soul 
had said to the Gilded Youth in the hospital com- 
pound, while the buzzing monsters in the air were 
singing their nightingale songs of death in the 
moonlight. 

We left the Young Doctor after he had 
squeezed out of us all the news we had of the 
girl. Long after we had passed through the gar- 
den gate, out into the white, gravel-paved court 
under the proud arch and into the crooked, low, 
grey- walled canyon of the street, we thought of 



"By the Dawn's Early Light" 225 

the Young Doctor sitting there reading blue eyes 
into china asters, red hair into dahhas, pink 
cheeks into the phlox, and hearing ineffable things 
whispered among the leaves of the melancholy 
yew tree. And all that, in a land of waste and 
desolation, with war's alarms on every wind. 

And we thought that he looked more like a poet 
than a Doctor even in his uniform ; and less like 
a soldier than either. Such is the alchemy of 
love in youth! 



CHAPTER VI 

WHEREIN WE BECOME A TRIO AND JOURNEY 
TO ITALY 

AS the autumn deepened we found our Red 
Cross work ending. This work had taken 
Henry and me from our quiet country newspa- 
per offices in Kansas and had suddenly pkmged 
us into the turmoil of the big war. For days and 
days we had been riding in motor cars along the 
line in France from Rouen to Bacarat and often 
ambulances had hauled us — always more or less 
frightened ■ — up near the trenches of the front 
line. We had tramped through miles of hos- 
pitals and had snuggled eagerly into the little 
dugouts and caves that made the first aid posts. 
We had learned many new and curious things — 
most of which were rather useless in publishing 
the Wichita Beacon or the Emporia Gazette; as, 
for instance, how to wear a gas mask, how to fire 
a trench mortar, how to look through a trench 
periscope, and how to duck when a shell comes 
226 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 227 

in. Also we had stood god-father to a serial 
love affair that began on the boat coming over 
and was for ever being " continued in our next." 
And it was all — riding along the line, huddling 
in abris, sneaking scared to death along trenches, 
and ducking from the shells — all vastly diverting. 
We had grown fat on it; not that we needed just 
that expression of felicity, having four hundred 
pounds between us. But it was almost finished 
and we were sadly turning our faces westward to 
our normal and reasonably honest lives at home, 
when Medill McCormick came to Paris and 
tempted us to go to Italy. It was a great temp- 
tation; "beyond the Alps lies Italy," as a copy 
book sentence has lure in it, and as a possible 
journey to a new phase of the war, it caught us; 
and we started. 

So we three stood on the platform, at the sta- 
tion at Modane, in Savoy, a few hundred yards 
from the Italian border, one fair autumn day, 
and our heavy clothes — two Red Cross uniforms 
and a pea-green hunting suit, made us sweat copi- 
ously and unbecomingly. The two Red Cross 
uniforms belong to Henry and me ; the pea-green 
hunting outfit belonged to Medill McCormick, 
congressman at large from Illinois, U. S. A. He 
was going into Italy to study the situation. As 



228 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

a congressman he felt that he should be really 
informed about the war as it was the most vital 
subject upon which he should have to vote. So 
there we stood, two Kansas editors, and an Illi- 
nois congressman, while the uniforms of the con- 
tinent brushed by us, in uniforms ourselves, after 
a fashion, but looking conspicuously civilian, and 
incorrigibly middle western. Medill in his pea- 
green hunting outfit looked more soldierly than 
we. For although we wore Sam Browne belts, 
to indicate that we were commissioned officers — 
commissioned as Red Cross Colonels — and al- 
though we wore Parisian uniforms of correct 
cut, we knew in our hearts that they humped in 
the back and flopped in the front, and sagged at 
the shoulders. A fat man can't wear the mod- 
ern American army uniform without looking like 
a sack of meal. Henry fell to calling the tunics 
our Mother Hubbards. We looked long and en- 
viously at the slim-waisted boys in khaki ; but we 
never could get their god-like effects. For alas, 
the American uniform is high-waisted, and a fat 
man never was designed for a Kate Greenaway! 
So we paced the platform at Modane trying to 
look unconcerned while the soldiers of France, 
Italy, Russia, Belgium, England and Rumania 
walked by us, clearly wondering what form of 




A fat man can't wear the modern American Army 
uniform without looking' like a sack of meal 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 231 

military freak we were. For the American Red 
Cross uniform was not so familiar in those lati- 
tudes as it was to be a month later, when Major 
Murphy came swinging through Modane with 
forty-eight carloads of Red Cross supplies, a 
young army of Red Cross nurses and workers, 
and half a million dollars in ready cash to spend 
upon the stricken cities of Northern Italy choked 
with refugees fleeing before the German invasion ! 
Today, the American flag floats from a hundred 
flag-poles in Italian cities, from Venice to Naples. 
Under that flag the American Red Cross has soup 
kitchens, food stations, aid bureaus for civilian 
relief all along the line of the invader in Italy, 
and the Red Cross uniform which made the sol- 
diers' eyes bug out there at the border in the 
early autumn, now is familiar and welcome in 
Italy. But we three unsoldierly looking civilians 
took that uniform into a strange country. 

Our first evening in Italy was spent in Genoa. 
And coming direct from Paris, where men out 
of uniform were few, the thing that opened our 
mouths in wonder was the number of men we saw. 
There were worlds and worlds of men in Genoa ; 
men in civilian clothes. The streets were black 
with men. Straw hats, two piece suits, gay neck- 
ties — things which were as remote from France 



232 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

as from Mars, figures that recalled the ancient 
days of one's youth, before the war; days in New 
York, for instance, where men in straw hats and 
white crash were common. These things we saw 
with amazement in Genoa! And then our eyes 
caught the flashy bands on their arms — - bands 
that indicated that these men are in the industrial 
reserves, not drafted because they are doing in- 
dustrial war work. But for all of these indus- 
trial reservists there was an overplus of men in 
Genoa. It is a seaport and there were " the mar- 
ket girls and fishermen, the shepherds and the 
sailors, too," a crowd gathered from the world's 
ends, and we sat under the deep arches before a 
gay cafe, listened to New York musical hits from 
the summer's roof gardens, and watched the 
show. In that day — only three weeks before 
the German invasion — the war was a long way 
from Genoa. At the next table to us an Ameri- 
can sea-faring man was telling an English naval 
officer about the adventures of three sailing ships 
which had bested two submarines three days be- 
fore in the Mediterranean ; some Moroccan sailors 
were flirting across two tables with some pretty 
Piedmontese girls, and inside the cafe, the harp, 
the flute and the violin were doing what they 
could to make all our hearts beat young ! A pic- 



PVe Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 233 

ture show across the street sprayed its gay crowd 
over the sidewalks and a vaudeville house down 
stairs gathered up rivulets of humanity from the 
spray. Somewhere near by was a dance, for we 
heard the rhythmic swish and lisp of young feet 
and the gay cry of the music. Here and there 
came a soldier; sometimes we saw a woman in 
mourning; but uniforms and mourners were un- 
common. The war was a tale that is told. 

But the next day in Rome the war moved into 
our vision again. But even if Rome was more 
visibly martial than Genoa, still it was not Paris. 
One could see gay colours upon women in Rome ; 
one might see straw hats upon the men, and in 
the stores and shops the war did not fill every 
•window as it filled the shop windows of Paris. 
Rome was taking the war seriously, of course, but 
the war was not the tragedy to Rome before the 
invasion that it was to France. 

Yet there was to me a change in Rome — from 
the Rome one knew who had been there eight 
years before — a change stranger and deeper than 
the change one felt in coming from Rome to 
Paris. This new Rome was a cleaner Rome, a 
more prosperous Rome, a happier Rome. Sorne- 
thing had been happening to the people. iThey 
wore better clothes, they seemed to live in cleaner 



234 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

tenements; they certainly had a different squint 
at Hfe from the Romans of the first decade of 
this century^ One heard two answers to the 
question that arose in one's heart. One group 
said : " It is prosperity. Italy never has seen 
such prosperity as she has seen during the past 
ten years. There has been work for everyone, 
and work at good wages. So you see the work- 
ing people well-clad, well-housed, clean and con- 
tented." Another answered the question thus: 
" The Socialists have done it. We have had 
plenty of work in other years ; but we have worked 
for small wages, and have lived in squalor. We 
still work as we always have worked, but we get 
better pay, and we get our better pay in many 
ways; first in relatively higher wages, next in 
safeguards thrown around labour, and restric- 
tions on the predatory activities of capital. The 
Socialists in government have forced many re- 
forms in housing, in labour conditions, in the dis- 
tribution of the profits of labour and capital, and 
we are living in hope of better things rather than 
in fear of worse! " One may take his choice of 
answers ; probably the truth lies between the two. 
I Prosperity has done something ; socialism in gov- 
ernment has done something, and each has pro- 
moted the other ! \ 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 235 

But the war has done one thing to Rome in- 
disputably. It has paralysed the tourist business. 
Rome was the greatest tourist city in the world. 
But now her boarding houses and her ruins are 
deserted. Occasionally in the shops one sees that 
mother and daughter, wistful, eager, half-starved 
for every good thing in life, expatriated, living 
shabbily in the upper regions of some respectable 
pension, detached from the world about them, 
uprooted from the world at home, travel -jaded, 
ruin-sated, picture-wise and unbelievably stupid 
concerning life's real interests — the mother and 
daughter who in the old days lived so numer- 
ously amid the splendours of Europe, flitting 
from Rome to Florence, from Florence to Lu- 
cerne, from Lucerne to Berlin, and thence to Paris 
and London, following the seasons like the birds. 
But today war prices have sent that precious pair 
home, and let us hope to honest work. It is a 
comfort to see Rome without their bloodless 
faces ! That much the war has done for democ- 
racy at any rate ! 

And the passing of this " relic of old dacincy," 
the shabby genteel of the earth from Rome — 
even if the passing is a temporary social phe- 
nomenon, has a curious symbolic timeliness, com- 
ing when the working class is rising. It leaves 



236 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

Rome almost as middle class as Kansas City and 
Los Angeles! For in Rome one feels that the 
upper class, the ruling class of other centuries, is 
weaker than it is elsewhere in the world. They 
tell you flippantly that the king is training his son 
to run for president. The high caste Romans 
have an Austrian pride, that " goeth before de- 
struction." For politically their power is sadly 
on the wane. They are miserably moth-eaten 
compared to our own arrogant princes of Wall 
Street or even compared to the dazed dukes and 
earls of England, who are looking out at the 
wreck of matter and the crash of worlds about 
them. One feels vaguely that these Italian nobles 
are passing through a rather mean stage of decay. 
For a time during the latter part of the last cen- 
tury and during the first decade of this century, 
the Italian noblemen tried to edge into business. 
They lent their names to promotion schemes, and 
the schemes, upon the whole, turned out badly, 
and the people learned to distrust all financial 
schemes under noble patronage; so the nobility is 
going to work. A few strong families remain — 
the present royal house of Savoy is among the 
strong ones. 

Our business led us to a call on the Duke of 
Genoa, uncle to the King, who in the King's ab- 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 237 

sence at the front with his soldiers, was a sort of 
acting king on the job in Rome. The automobile 
took us into the first court of the Royal Palace. 
Now the Royal Palace — save for a few execu- 
tive offices — has been turned into an army hos- 
pital and we saw doctors and nurses dodging in 
and out of the innumerable corridors, and smelled 
iodoform everywhere. A major domo, in scar- 
let, who seemed in the modern disinfected smell 
of the place like the last guard of mediaevalism, 
greeted us as we alighted from our car ; a great, 
powerful soldier he was, with white and gold on 
his scarlet broadcloth. He showed us into a 
passage where the minister waited who was to 
take us to the Duke, The minister led us down 
a long stately gallery, out of the twentieth century 
into the fifteenth, where at the end of the gallery 
a most remarkably caparisoned servant stood at 
attention. He wore a scarlet coat of unimagin- 
able vividness, a cut-away coat of glaring scarlet 
broadcloth. But we could have passed that easily 
enough. The thing that held us was his blue 
plush knee breeches. It didn't seem fitting that 
a man in this age of work and wisdom should 
wear shimmering blue plush knee breeches for 
everyday. He was a big fellow and puffy. And 
the scarlet coat and blue breeches certainly gave 



238 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

the place an olden golden air. But alas! The 
twentieth century burst in. For he bowed us to 
an elevator — a modern Chicago elevator in- 
spected by an accident company, guaranteeing the 
passengers against injuries! From the elevator 
we were emptied into a nineteenth century corri- 
dor, guarded by a twentieth century soldier and 
then we were turned by him into a waiting room. 
It was floored with marquetry, ceiled with brown 
and gold decoration — but modern enough — and 
walled in old tapestry. The room expressed the 
ornate impotent gorgeousness of a useless leisure 
class. Four or five tables, cases and stands, 
backed standoffishly against the tapestry on the 
walls, and the legs and bases of this furniture 
were great — unbelievably great, rococo gilded 
legs — legs that writhed and twisted themselves 
in a sheening agony of impossible forms, before 
they resigned themselves to dropping to the floor 
in distress. 

Henry nudged me as our Kansas eyes bugged 
out at the Byzantine splendour and whispered: 
" Bill, what this place needs is a boss buster move- 
ment. How the Kansas legislature would wallop 
this splendour in the appropriation bill! How 
the Sixth District outfit would strip the blue plush 
off our upholstered friend by the elevator and 




He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable vividness, a 
cutaway coat of glaring scarlet broadcloth 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 241 

send him shinning home in a barrel. Topeka," 
sighed Henry, deeply impressed, " never will 
equal this ! " 

In this room we met a soldierly young prince, 
in a dark blue dress uniform, with a light blue 
sash across his shoulder. He shook hands with 
us. And he wore gloves and didn't say, " Excuse 
my glove," as we do in Kansas ! But he was po- 
lite enough for the Grand Duke himself; indeed 
we thought he was the Grand Duke until we saw 
Medill and the minister stalking through another 
door, saw the minister formally bowing and then 
we found that we had been moved into another 
room — a rather plainly furnished office room, 
such as one might find in New York or Chicago 
when one called on the head of a bank or of an 
industrial corporation. We had left the " days 
of old when knights were bold," and had come 
bang! into the latest moment of the twentieth 
century. We were shaking hands rather cor- 
dially with a kindly-eyed, bald-headed little man 
in a grey VanDyke beard, who wore a black frock 
coat, rather a low-cut white vest, a black four-in- 
hand rather wider than the Fifth Avenue mode, 
striped dark grey trousers, and no jewelry ex- 
cept a light double-breasted gold watch-chain. 
He was the Duke of Genoa, who to all intents 



242 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

and purposes is the civilian ruler of Italy while 
the King is with the army. We found four 
chairs grouped around a sofa, and we sat while 
the duke, with a diffidence that amounted to shy- 
ness, talked with us about most unimportant 
things. The interview was purely ceremonial. 
It had no relation to the passports we were asking 
from his government to visit the Italian front, 
though this request had made the visit necessary. 
Several times there were pauses in the conversa- 
tion — dead stops in the talk, which court eti- 
quette required the Duke to repair. We didn't 
worry about them, for always he began to repair 
these gaps in the talk rather bashfully but kindly, 
and always the subject was impersonal and of 
indifferent interest. He made no sign that the 
interview was over, but we knew, as well as 
though a gong had struck, when to go. So we 
went, and it seemed to me that the Duke put more 
real enthusiasm into his good-bye than into his 
welcome. It was half-past five. He had been 
at work since eight. And perhaps it was fancy, 
but there seemed to be rising into his bland Italian 
eye a determination to knock off and take a half 
holiday. 

We noticed that his desk was clean, as clean 
as General Pershing's or Major Murphy's in 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 243 

Paris, or President Wilson's in Washington. 
Then it came to us that the king's job, after all, is 
a desk job. The king who used to go around 
ruling with a sceptre has given place to a gentle- 
man in a business suit who probably rings for his 
stenographer and dictates in part as follows : 
" Yours of even date received and contents 
noted ; in reply will say ! " We carried away an 
impression that the lot of royalty, like the police- 
man's lot, " is not a happy one." Talking it all 
over, we decided that in the modern world there 
is really any amount more fun running a news- 
paper than being a king, and for the size of the 
town, much more chance of getting things done. 
It did not fall to me because of an illness, but 
a few days later it fell to Henry and Medill to 
see a real king at Udine. He w^as living in a 
cottage a few miles out of town in a quiet little 
grove that protected him from airplanes. Now 
Henry's nearest brush to royalty was two years 
ago when in the New York suffrage campaign 
his oratory had brought him the homage of some 
of the rich and the great. Kings really weren't 
so much of a treat to Medill, who had taken 
his fill of them in childhood when his father 
was minister to England. But nevertheless they 
lorded it over me when they saw me because the 



244 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

king wasn't on my calling list. But they 
couldn't keep from me the sad fact that they had 
started out to make the royal call without gloves 
— hoping probably to catch the king with their 
bare hands — and had been turned back by the 
Italian colonel who had them in charge. Henry 
once sang in the cantata of " Queen Esther," and 
Medill insists that all the way up to the royal 
cottage Henry kept carolling under his breath the 
song : " Then go thou merrily, then go thou 
merrily, unto the king!" and also: " Haman, 
Haman, long live Haman, he is the favoured 
one in all the king's dominions!" just to show 
that finical colonel who took them back to Udine 
for gloves that Wichita was no stranger to the 
inside politics of the court. However, gloves 
seemed to be the only ceremonial frill required, 
and they went to the king's business office as in- 
formally as they would go to the private room of 
a soap-maker in Cincinnati. They found the king 
a soft-spoken little man. Henry said he looked 
very much like the mayor of Kansas City, and 
was equally unassuming and considerate. He 
asked his guests what had become of the Progres- 
sive party, and they pointed to themselves as the 
" captain and crew of the Nancy brig." Then they 
talked on for a time about many things — such as 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 245 

would interest the Walrus and the Carpenter. 
Then the accounts of the visit changed. This 
is Henry's : " Well, finally after Medill began 
cracking his knuckles and the king began cross- 
ing and recrossing his legs, I saw it was time to 
go. I knew how the king felt. Every busy 
man has to meet a lot of bores. I sit hours 
with bores who flow into the Wichita Beacon 
office, and I began to appreciate just how the 
king felt. So I cleared my throat and said: 
* Well Medill, don't you think we'd better ex- 
cuse ourselves to his majesty and go ? ' The king 
put up his hand mildly and said : ' O please ! ' and 
the colonel in charge of the party gulped at 
my sympathy for the king; but I was not to be 
balked, and we all rose and after shaking hands 
around, the colonel led us out. And I didn't 
know that I had committed social manslaughter 
until the colonel exclaimed when we were in the 
corridor : ' Oh you republicans — you republi- 
cans, how you do like to show royalty its place ! ' " 
Medill has another version. He declares that 
Henry stood the king's obvious ennui as long as 
he could, then he rose and cried : " O King ! 
live for ever, but Medill and I must pull our 
freight ! " This version probably is apoch- 
ryphal! The Italian colonel declares that Henry 



246 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

expostulated : " Well, how in the dickens was I 
to know that a king always gives the high sign 
for company to leave ! " 

This Italian king is a vital institution. He 
could be elected president. For he is a mixer, 
in spite of his diffident ways. When the army 
in Northern Italy was hammering away at the 
Austrians, the king was with the soldiers. One 
gets the impression that he is with the people 
pretty generally in their struggle with the privi- 
leged classes. For he has lived peaceably with 
a socialist cabinet for some time. He is wise 
enough to realize that if the aristocracy is crum- 
bling, the institution of royalty will crumble with 
aristocracy if royalty makes an ally of the no- 
bility. So the king and the Socialists get along 
splendidly. N'owftKe Socialists in Italy are of 
several kinds. There are the city Socialists, who 
are chiefly interested in industrial conditions — 
wages, old age pensions, employment insurance, 
and the like; a group much like the Progressive 
party in the United States of 1912. We saw the 
works and ways of these Socialists in .every 
Italian town that we visited. Either they or the 
times have done wonders. And at any rate this 
is the first time in Italian history when industrial 
prosperity has so generally reached the workers 



PVe Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 2^y 

that they are lifted almost bodily into the middle 
classes. Then there are the Socialists who em- 
phasize the land question, and they have hadj 
smaller success than their industrial brethrenJ 
We went one fine day to Frascatti by automobile. 
Our road took us out south of Rome over the New 
Appian way, through fertile acres lying in a wide 
beautiful plain. We passed through half a dozen 
little agricultural villages, mean but picturesque. 
None of the splendid prosperity of the cities has 
penetrated here. The people in these towns are 
peasants — and look it. They are the peasant 
people who live in the canvasses of the artists of 
the Renaissance. Half a thousand years has not 
changed them. Along the dusty roads we passed 
huge wine-carts. Two bell-bearing mules tan- 
dem gave warning to other passing carts of a 
cart's approach. The driver of the cart was 
curled up in his shaded seat asleep. The mules 
took their way. Carts passed and repassed each 
other on the road. Autos whizzed by. Still 
the drivers slept. They were ragged, frowsy, 
stupid looking. They all wore colour, one a 
crimson belt, another a blue shirt, a third a red 
handkerchief about his head. They would make 
better pictures than citizens, we thought. In 
Rome and Genoa the people would make better 



248 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

citizens than pictures. All day going to Fras- 
catti and coming home we passed these beggarly 
looking peasant farmers. At Frascatti, which 
stands proudly upon a great hill overlooking the 
Roman plain, we saw the rich acres stretching 
away for miles toward Rome and beyond it. 
Villages flashed in the sun, white and iridescent, 
and the squares of vineyards and the tall Lom- 
bardy poplars made a landscape that rested the 
eye and soothed the soul. We stood looking at 
it for a long time. With us were some high 
officials of the Italian government. 

" A wonderful landscape," said Flenry to our 
hosts. 

" In all the world there is no match for it," 
said Medill. 

" It has lain this way for three thousand years, 
bearing crops year after year!" explained our 
host. 

" Signor," said a friend of our host, " they 
tell me that this land yields seven per cent net." 

" Yes," replied our host. " I was talking to a 
man in the agricultural department about it the 
other day; it really nets seven per cent." 

" What's this land worth an acre ? " This 
question came from me, who has the Kansas 
man's seven devil lust to put a price on land. 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 249 

" Well — I don't — " Our host looked at his 
Italian friends. They gazed, puzzled and be- 
wildered, and consulted one another. The dis- 
cussion developed a curious situation. No one 
knew the price of that land. With us, out in 
the Middle West, a boy learns the probable price 
of the land in his neighborhood, as soon as he 
learns the points of the compass. Finally our 
host explained : " The truth of the matter is that 
this land never has been sold in the memory of 
living men. Probably most of it has remained in 
its present ownership for from three hundred to 
five hundred years. No one sells land. in Italy." 

And that revealed much; there was the whole 
program of the agrarian Socialist. The man on 
the wine-cart asleep, the peasant villages, the rags 
and the poverty, the hovels that we saw on the 
rich land and the crumbling aristocracy of Rome, 
living meanly, striving vainly, bewildered, and 
bedevilled, trying to make profits out of a dor- 
mant tenantry, grinding seven per cent out of the 
land and yet losing money by it — all these things 
were the meat of the answer, which recounted 
the long unbroken line of feudal ownership of 
the land, j Wooden ploughs and oxen, women 
yoked with beasts of burden, vines and vines 
planted and replanted through the centuries; no 



250 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

capital to develop the land; insufficient profits 
to wake up the tenants, master and servant going 
gradually down in a world where labour and capi- 
tal, sharing profits equitably, are rising ; it was a 
disheartening probleml 

Then in due course we left Rome and went 
to the Italian army on the front, and there we 
saw another side of the shield. From Udine in 
Northern Italy we journeyed into the mountains 
where the Italian army at that time was holding 
the mountain tops against the Austrians. Wher- 
ever we ascended we saw white ribbons of roads 
twining up the green soft mountain sides that 
face Italy. These roads have been made since 
the war. Nearly four thousand miles of them 
furnish approaches to the Alpine heights. They 
are hard-surfaced, low-graded, wide highways 
gouged into the mountain side. Two automo- 
biles may pass at full speed anywhere on these 
roads. And all night they were alive with wagon 
trains bearing supplies to the front. Women 
help the men mend the roads. We saw few Aus- 
trian prisoners at work on the Italian roads; 
possibly because we were too near the front line 
trenches to see prisoners who are kept thirty 
kilos back of the line, and possibly because they 
have better work for the Austrians — work that 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 251 

old men and women cannot do. Whenever we 
threaded our way up a mountain side and came 
to a top, we found its flanks tunnelled with 
deep wicker-walled, broad-floored, well-drained 
trenches, and its top honeycombed with run- 
ways for ammunition and with great rooms for 
soldiers and holes for gun barrels. Mountain 
top after mountain top has been made into a 
Gibraltar by the Italians. That Gibraltar was 
300 miles long, before they lost it to the Ger- 
mans. But they had few guns in their fortress. 
They showed us emplacement after emplace- 
ment without a stick of artillery in it. They had 
told the French and the English of their plight, 
and a few artillery companies had been sent in; 
but only a fraction of the need. There was no 
central council of the allies then. Every nation 
was running its own little war, and Italy was left 
to fall, and now the four thousand miles of 
Italian roads, and the 300 miles of Gibraltar are 
German military strongholds that will have to be 
conquered with our blood and iron. Probably 
no battle line in the world today is more interest- 
ing than the Italian front was in the autumn of 
191 7. The south face of the Alps often is green 
and beautiful, but generally the northern faces of 
those mountains are bleak and rugged and steep. 



252 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

The battle line ran a zig-zag course through the 
mountains, now meeting in gulches, now scurry- 
ing away up to mesas, again climbing to the top of 
the barren heights. We stood one sunny day on 
a quiet sector of the Pasubio. We were with 
the Liguria brigade, the 1 57-1 58th infantry. 
Through a peep-hole in the trench we looked 
across a gulch to another mountainside and saw 
there the Austrian trenches, not 20O' yards away. 
Before them lay the ugly scar of brown rusted 
barbed wire, and just below the wire, sprawled 
out on the white limestone of the steep moun- 
tainside, lay fifty dead Italian soldiers who had 
vainly charged into the machine guns up that 
formidable slope. They had lain there for weeks. 
It was the grisliest sight we had seen during our 
adventures. 

Medill and Henry went to another lookout, 
leaving me with the Italian soldiers in the trench. 
Their luncheon came up, a fine rich soup, with 
bread cubes in it, some potatoes and vegetables. 
It looked palatable and was good. There was 
enough, but not plenty. As we sat in the trench 
waiting for Henry and Medill, one of the heroes 
beside me, after thinking it all out carefully, burst 
forth with this : 

" I livea in Pittsburgh." 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 253 

It was plain to his comrades that he had put 
his meaning through to me. They clearly were 
impressed by his prowess. This cheered him up. 
He went on to further linguistic feats. 

" Is, I live-a there five year." 

That also got over and his comrades realized 
that he was a polyglot. Then in a joyous spirit 
of over-confidence, he waved the oriflamme of 
speech in our faces. 

" Is, my papa he live-a in Brooklyn. He keepa 
da butcha shop and is maka da roast bif. Is, my 
papa's brodder he live-a in Brooklyn too. He 
keepa da saloon and is maka da jag! " Then we 
shook hands as fellow Americans. 

In another hour we had wormed our way 
through the tunnels to the other side of the 
peak, and had scrambled down the mountainside 
to the general headquarters. Never since Han- 
nibal's day were more interesting brigade head- 
quarters established. They were niched into the 
mountain side about 4,000 feet above a gorge 
below. The sleeping quarters and offices were 
half tunnelled into the hillside. The diningroom 
was mounted on a platform overlooking the 
gorge below. Across the gorge a quarter of a 
mile away an aerial tram ran. That morning two 
airplanes — an Italian plane and an Austrian — 



254 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

met out by the tram wire in a battle. It could 
be seen as easily from the diningroom platform 
as if it had been half down the block; yet the 
airmen were 4,000 feet in the air. We had lunch- 
eon at the brigade headquarters, and it was made 
a gala occasion. Some one had brought in an 
Austrian cow which was brigade property and 
we had real cream. Otherwise it was a war din- 
ner. We had hors d'ouvres — thin sliced dried 
ham, sausages, and sardines — a delectable paste 
with parmesian cheese on it, roast beef and brown 
potatoes, salad and broiled chicken, and then the 
chef d'ouvres, the cream upon a charlotte russe! 
After that came cheese and coffee. Chianti and 
a cider champagne were served. The mess was 
proud of itself, as it should have been. But it 
seems sad to think how soon that Austrian cow 
went home. For within three weeks from the 
time we sat there, the general had surrendered 
in the gulch below the air-tram wire and the Ger- 
mans had come with their big guns to fill the 
vacant emplacements ! 

We spent one night on our journey along the 
Italian front at Vicenza, and there, although the 
place was jammed full of soldiers, we left the 
war behind to stroll by moonlight over the beauti- 
ful mediaeval town. There is a fine square 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 255 

there — not so broad as the square at St. Mark's 
where the tourists used to feed the doves, but to 
me it seemed as beautiful. For upon the square 
was the famous arcade which Palladio erected 
around the city-hall of the place. It stood 
beautiful and gloomy before us in the moonlight, 
one of the world's real bits of architecture. As 
Americans we had a special interest in the ar- 
cade because it was typical of the best of Palla- 
dio's work and our own Thomas Jefferson, study- 
ing it, had reproduced it and Americanized it in 
some of the buildings of the University of Vir- 
ginia, buildings that have had a distinct influence 
upon American architecture ! A number of Palla- 
dio's other works we saw that night, softened and 
glorified by the moonlight. And we saw also an 
old French house, not twenty-five feet wide, but 
a gem of French architecture erected before the 
discovery of America. Finally we went back and 
stood by the statue of Palladio and listened to 
the low rumble of the guns on the front and won- 
dered what the Germans would do with such a 
lovely thing as this Vicenza if by any chance they 
ever took it. That day we had looked down 
from a mountain-top upon an Austrian town lying 
peacefully in the valley below us directly under 
the Italian guns. The guns of the Austrians 



256 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

and the Italians were smashing away at each 
other from the mountain-tops over and across the 
town. 

" You could pulverize that town easily 
enough," Henry said to the Italian who was tak- 
ing the Americans through the trenches. 

" Oh, yes," he answered. " But it's a beautiful 
little town! Why ruin it?" His theory was 
that if the Italians took it they would want it 
whole and would want the loyalty and respect of 
the people of the town; if they did not take it, 
why smash a beautiful little town just to be 
smashing? 

The German theory, of course, is exactly op- 
posite to this. They would smash the town, if 
they were to take it, to put fear into the hearts of 
the inhabitants and command obedience; and if 
they knew they could not take it they would smash 
it to cripple the enemy that much ! \ We of the 
Allies desire respect and loyalty that come from 
reason. The Germans demand unreasoning 
obedience and denied that, they destroy. One 
philosophy is Christian; the other Babylonian/ 
But the devilish strength of the German philo- 
sophy came to us more forcibly in Italy than it 
came elsewhere because of certain contrasts. 
They were contrasts in what might be called 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 257 

public wisdom. ^ The Germans take better care 
of their poor than some of the AUies, The Ger- 
mans know that poverty is a curse to a nation, 
and during the past generation they have done 
much to alleviate it. And in alleviating poverty 
they have kept their poor docile; and they go 
into battle feeling that they have something to 
fight for. In the allied countries too often we 
have let the devil take the hindermostj As we 
rode one afternoon from Vicenza to Milan we 
wondered, looking at the farms and the farmers 
along the road, why those farmers should be 
asked to die for a country that kept them in so 
low an estate.! And yet they were better off than 
the farmers of Southern Italy. But in socializ- 
ing industry the Italian farmer has been for- 
gotten, and when the press came upon the Italian 
front, thousands of ignorant peasant soldiers lay 
down their arms, deluded by a German spy ruse 
so simple that it should have fooled no intelligent 
soldier. But they were not intelligent. Their 
intelligence had been eaten up by their landlords 
for generations, and in a crisis the German civili- 
zation overcame its enemy! j Ybii cannot shake 
the sleeping peasant on the wine-cart from a thou- 
sand years' sleep and make him get up and go ©ut 
and whip a soldier who is even half awake! \ 



258 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

As we rode from Vicenza to Milan we had a 
curious experience. There entered our compart- 
ment at twilight one of the carabinieri ! We had 
been looking with admiration at the carabinieri for 
days. They were well-set-up soldiers, apparently 
of a picked grade of men, who wore wide cocked 
hats, like those worn by the British troops in the 
American revolution. The cocked hats of the 
Italian carabinieri are as wide as their handsome 
shoulders and they make striking figures. This 
one who entered our compartment was drunk — 
grandly, gorgeously and sociably drunk. He 
wanted to talk to us. He tried Italian and we 
shook our heads. Then Medill tackled him in 
French and he shook his head. Then Henry 
squared off and gave him the native Kansas Eng- 
lish — with appropriate gestures. But the Italian 
sighed amiably and it was clear he was balked. 
Then he looked up and down the outer corridor of 
the car, came in, shut the door and smiled as 
broadly as his cocked hat. 

" Sprecken sie Deutsch ? " he asked, and Medill 
answered, " Seemlich ! " When it was apparent 
that two of us understood German he opened 
up. He had to talk slowly, but he was willing 
to make any sacrifice to get conversation going. 
He rambled along in a maudlin way, and finally 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 259 

picked up an illustrated paper containing an ac- 
count of the Turin riots, which angered him, and 
then and there being, that Italian soldier told us 
in German the story of what he called der grosser 
rebellion! To talk German in an allied country- 
today is as much as one's life is worth. For a 
soldier to talk German is a crime; for a soldier 
to tell three foreigners about a riot in his country, 
which he, as a soldier behind machine guns had 
to suppress, killing hundreds, was mighty near to 
treason. And we gasped. We thought he might 
he testing us out as potential spies. So we shut 
up. But he ambled on, and slowly, as the liquor 
overcame him, he ran down and went sound asleep 
with the offending paper in his arms. Perhaps 
he was one of those Germans wearing the Italian 
uniform who in the German drive three weeks 
later gave commands to the ignorant peasant 
regiments to lay down their arms and surrender ! 
At least it was reported in Europe that thousands 
of them abandoned their works under the com- 
mand of German spies ! 

When we arrived at Milan we found there 
waiting for us a note from the Gilded Youth, 
whom we had met coming over on the boat from 
America. And it brought back our everlasting 
love affair. It is curious how that love affair 



26o Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

kept projecting itself into the consciousness of 
two middle-aged men who reasonably may be 
supposed to have passed out of the zone of true 
romance. But the memory of the hazel eyes of 
the Gilded Youth as he gazed at the pretty face 
of the young nurse there in the moonlight at 
Landrecourt, with such exaltation and joy, kept 
bobbing back into our minds as we saw other 
lovers in other lands, married and single, crossing 
our paths. And there was the Young Doctor, 
diffident and reticent, who had his heart set on 
the girl, and the contest furnished us with a death- 
less theme for speculation. And here at Milan 
came this letter — just a note forwarded from 
Paris — telling us that the Gilded Youth could 
" stand and wait " no longer; he was going to hit 
back. He had quit the Ambulance service for 
aviation. And he was in a training camp near 
Paris. We wondered how many times during 
his training he would slip across the sky to 
Landrecourt to visit his true love. The one- 
horse buggy had been the only lover's chariot 
known to Henry and me, and we remembered 
how a red-wheeled cart used to lay out the neigh- 
bours in the heroic days of the nineties. So in 
our meditative moments we considered what a 
paralysing spectacle it would be for the neigh- 




We thought he might be testing us out as potential 
spies 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 263 

hours to see a young man come swooping down 
upon his lady love's bower in an airplane and 
Henry, who was betting on the Gilded Youth as 
against the Doctor, began taking even money 
again ! 

Milan we found today is an industrial town, 
entirely modern, dominated not by the cathe- 
dral as of old, but by the spirit of the new Italy. 
They took us to a luncheon given by the American 
chamber of commerce. We heard nothing of 
their antiquities, and little of their ruins. We 
had to fight to get time to see the cathedral, 
whose windows are boarded up or filled with 
white glass; but the Milanese were anxious to 
have us see their great factories ; their automobile 
works, their Caproni airship plant and the up- 
to-the-minute organization of industrial efficiency 
everywhere. Here in Milan we saw thousands 
of men out of uniform, but wearing the rib- 
bon arm-band of the industrial reservists. We 
fancied these Milanese were bigger, huskier men 
than the men in the south of Italy, and that they 
looked better-kept and better-bred. They cer- 
tainly are a fierce and indomitable people. The 
Austrians don't raid the Milanese in airships. 
They said that once the Austrians came and the 
next day the Milanese loaded up a fleet of big 



264 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

Capronis with 30,000 pounds of high explosives, 
sailed over Austria and blew some town to atoms. 
So Milan has never been bothered since as other 
border towns of Italy have been bothered by 
air-raiders. The days we spent in Milan were 
like days in a modem American industrial city 

— say Toledo, or St. Paul or Detroit or Kansas 
City. 

Turin is similarly modern and industrial, 
though not so beautiful as Milan. In Turin we 
saw the scene of the riot — the " grosser rebel- 
lion," which our carabinieri friend told us about. 
Signor Nitti, now a member of the Italian cabinet, 
who entertained us in Rome, told the Italian par- 
liament — according to the American newspapers 

— that the millers caused the riot. The bread ra- 
tion did not come to Turin one morning, and the 
working people struck. Nitti says the millers 
were hoarding flour and caused the delay. The 
strike grew general over the city. Workers wan- 
dering about the town were threatened with the 
police if they congregated. They congregated, 
and some troops from a nearby training camp 
were called. The troops were new; they were 
also friends of the strikers. They refused to fire. 
Then the strikers built barricades in the streets 
and in a day or so the regular troops came down 



We Become a Trio and Journey to Italy 265 

from the mountains with machine guns, fired 
on the barricades and when hundreds were hit 
the rebellion was quelled. And Signor Nitti says 
it was all because some profit hog stopped the 
ordinary flow of flour from the farmer to the 
consumer of bread! There is, of course, the 
other side. They told us in Turin that boys in 
their teens were found dead back of the barri- 
cades with thousand lire notes in their pockets, 
and that German agents came during the first 
hours of the strike and spread money lavishly 
to make the riot a rebellion. Probably this is 
true. The profiteer made the strike possible. It 
was an opportunity for rebellion, and Germany 
took the opportunity. Always she is on hand 
with spies to buy what she cannot honestly win. 
Reluctantly we turned our faces from Italy to 
France. Yet the journey had been well worth 
while. We came home with a definite and hope- 
ful impression about Italy. The Turin riot, bad 
as it was, was not an anti-war riot. It was di- 
rected at the bad administration of the food con- 
troller. Italy then was not an invaded country, 
as France was, and had no such enthusiasm for 
the war, as a nation has when its soil is invaded. 
Italy has that enthusiasm now for the war. We 
saw that her man-power was hardly tapped. She 



266 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

has millions to pour into the trenches. She needs 
and will need until the end of the war, iron and 
coal. She will have to borrow her guns and her 
fuel. But she has almost enough food. We 
found sugar scarce; butter scarce, and bread 
sharply allowanced in hotels and restaurants. 
We found two meatless days a week besides Fri- 
day and found the people, as a rule, observing 
them. We found the industries of the nation 
turned solely toward the war. Italy realizes 
what defeat means. The pro-Austrian party 
which was strong at the beginning of the war has 
vanished, and since the invasion, even the Pope 
has lost his interest in peace ! 

But all these things are temporary; with the 
war's passing they will pass. ' The real thing we 
found was an awakening people, coming into the 
new century eager and wise and sure that it held 
somewhere in its coming years the dawn of a new 
day. That really is the hope of the war — an 
industrial hope, not a political hope, not a geo- 
graphical hope, but a hope for better things for 
the common man. It is a hope that Christianity 
may take Christendom, and that the fellowship 
among the nations of the world so devoutly hoped 
for, may be possible because of a fellowship 
among men inside of nations, j 



CHAPTER VII 

WHEREIN WE CONSIDER THE WOMAN 
PROPOSITION 

IT is curious how the human heart throws 
out homeseeking tendrils. As we crossed 
the ItaHan frontier and came back into France, 
keen longing* for the Ritz — even the Ritz with its 
gloomy grandeur came to me, and Henry con- 
fessed that he was glad to get back to a country 
where a man could get a good refreshing bowl of 
onion soup! After dinner, our first evening at 
the Ritz, we were looking over the theatrical 
offerings advertised upon the wall by the elevator 
at the hotel, when whom should we meet but 
" Auntie," the patrician relative of the Gilded 
Youth. She recognized us in our civilian clothes, 
and it fell to me to make the fool blunder of com- 
plicating our formal greetings with gaiety. 
Auntie's troubled face would have caught Henry's 
quick sensitive eyes. But Auntie's voice brushed 
aside the levity of the opening. 

"Haven't you heard — haven't you heard?" 
she asked. And we knew instinctively that some- 
267 



268 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

thing had happened to the Gilded Youth. And 
when one is in aviation something happening al- 
ways is serious. It was Henry's kind voice that 
conveyed our sympathy to her. And she told us 
of the accident. Two mornings before, while 
making his first flight alone, from the training 
camp near Paris, something went wrong with his 
engine while he was but a thousand feet in the 
air — and over Neuilly. He had to glide down, 
and being over a town he could not make a land- 
ing. They took him from the wreck of his plane, 
to the hospital near by — fortunately an Ameri- 
can Red Cross Hospital, where the people recog- 
nized him and sent for his aunt. All day and all 
night he had lain unconscious, and at noon had 
opened his eyes for a minute to find his aunt be- 
side him. " I brought with me," said Auntie, in 
a tone so significantly casual that it arrested our 
attention before she added, " that capable young 
nurse, the first assistant — " As she spoke she 
caught Henry's eyes and held him from looking 
at me, 

" You mean the one - — " said Henry in a tone 
quite as casual as Auntie's while giving eye for 
eye, 

" Yes, your pretty mid-western girl. She is 
with him now." Then Auntie lost Henry's eyes 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 269 

as tears brimmed into her own. " It has been 
twenty-six hours since we arrived at Neuilly. I 
shall return in an hour, and — " 

" I wish," cried Henry, " I wish there was 
something we could do ! " 

Auntie caught our embarrassed desire to be of 
service yet not to assume. Her strong fine face 
lighted with something kind enough for a smile, 
as she answered : " Couldn't you go out and see 
him ? I think no one else in Paris would be more 
welcome than you two ! " 

That puzzled us. She saw us looking our ques- 
tion at each other, and went on: " Life means 
more to him now than it ever has meant." She 
really smiled as she quoted : " * It means in- 
tensely and it means good ! ' " Auntie's tired 
eyes gathered us in again. " When you left 
Landrecourt last month he told me much about 
the voyage over here on the Espagne." The tired 
eyes left us to follow the crippled elevator boy 
who went pegging down the corridor as she con- 
tinued : " about his days in Paris before he went 
back to his ambulance unit ; about his meeting you 
that night near Douaumont, — at the first aid post 
and — and I know," she paused a second, pulled 
herself together and continued gently. " We 
must face things as they are. The boy's hours 



270 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

in this earth are short. He has other friends 
here, of course — old friends, but you — " again 
she stopped. " You will appreciate why when 
you see him." 

So we gave up the poor travesty upon life that 
we should have seen behind the footlights for a 
glimpse into one of life's real dramas. 

It was nearly midnight before we came to 
Neuilly and stood awkwardly beside the white 
cot in the little white room where the Gilded 
Youth was lying. How the gilding had fallen 
off! All white and broken he lay, a crushed 
wreck of a man, with the cluttering contrivances 
of science swathing him, binding him, encasing 
him, holding him miserably together while the 
tide of life ran out. But when he wakened he 
could smile. There was real gilding in that smile, 
the gilding of youth, but he only flashed his eyes 
upon us for a fleeting second in turning his smile 
to her — to the Eager Soul, to her who had 
brought some new incandescence into his life. 
Then we knew why his aunt had said that we 
should see him. He would have us who had wit- 
nessed the planting of the seed, know how it had 
flowered. His smile told us that also. He could 
lift no hand to us, and could speak but faintly. 
Yet his greeting held something princely in it — 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 271 

fine and sweet and brave. Then he did a curious 
thing. He began whistling very softly under his 
breath and between his teeth a queer little tune, 
that reminded one oddly of the theme of Tschai- 
covski's Symphony Pathetique — the first move- 
ment. As he whistled he turned from Henry 
and me and looked at the Eager Soul, who smiled 
back intelligently, and when she smiled he 
stopped. We could not understand their sig- 
nals. But whatever it was so far as it pretended 
to a show of courage, we knew that it was a gor- 
geous bluff. In the fleeting glance that he gave 
us, he told us the truth ; and we knew that he was 
pretending to the others that he did not know. 
We made some cheerful nothings in our talk, 
and would have gone but he held us. The Eager 
Soul looked at her watch, gave him some medi- 
cine, which we took to be a heart stimulant; for 
he revived under it, and said to me: 

" Remember — that night at Douaumont ? " 

" Where you whistled the 'Meditation from 
Thais,' in the moonlight?" 

"Yes," he murmured, "and we — watched — 
the trucks — come out of the mist — full of life 
— and go into the mist, — toward death." 

" Wonderful — wasn't it ! " sighed one of us. 

" Symbolic," he whispered. And our eyes fol- 



272 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

lowed his to the vivid face of the Eager Soul, 
in the halo of her nurse's cap. She was exceed- 
ingly glorious, and animate and beautiful. And 
he was passing into the mist, out toward death. 
He saw that he had got the figure to me, and 
smiled. Then suddenly something came into his 
face from afar, and he seemed to know that 
his frail craft had mounted the out-going tide. 
Slowly, very slowly life began to fade from his 
face. Further and further from shore the tide 
was bearing him. We seemed to be on the pier. 
The Eager Soul even leaned forward and put out 
a pretty hand, and waved at him. He signalled 
back with a twitch of his lips that was meant for 
a smile. And then we at the pier lost the last 
gleam of life and saw only the broken bark, 
wearily riding the racing tide. 

And then we turned from the pier and went 
our several ways back into the midst of life. We 
were going home, and getting ready to go home 
is a joyous proceeding. And there was another 
significance to our packing to leave Paris. It 
meant something more than a homeward jour- 
ney ; it meant that for the first time since we left 
Wichita and Emporia in midsummer we were 
turning our backs on war. It took a tug to 
make the turn. [From all over the earth the 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 273 

war draws men to it like an insatiable whirl- 
pool. And as we came nearer and nearer to war 
we had felt it swallow men into its vortex — men, 
customs, institutions, civilizations, indeed the age 
and epoch wherein we lived, we had felt moving 
into chaos — into nothing, to be reborn some day 
into we know not what, in the cataclysm out 
there on the front. ( We had seen it. But seeing 
it had revealed nothing. For many nights we 
had heard the distant roar of the hungry guns 
ever clamouring for more food, for the blood of 
youth, for the dreams of age, for the hopes of a 
race, for the creed of an era. And we left them 
still ravening, mad and unsated. And we were 
going_away as dazed as we were when we came. 
But as we packed our things in Paris, the thrall 
of it still gripped us and the consciousness that 
we were leaving the war was as strong in our 
hearts as the joy we felt at turning homewa rd.) 
But we got aboard the train and rode during the 
long lovely morning down the wide rich valley 
of the Seine, past Rouen, through Normandy 
with its steep hills which seem reflected in the 
sharp peaked roofs of its chateaux, and through 
musty mediaeval towns, in which it was hard to 
realize that modern industry was hiving. The 
hum of industry seemed badly out of key in a 



274 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

town with a cathedral whose architectural roots 
are a thousand years old, and whose streets have 
not yet been veined with sewers, and whose walls 
are gay with the fagades of the fifteenth century. 
The whole face of the landscape, town and 
country side, seemed to us like the back drop of 
the first act in a comic opera, and we were forever 
listening for *' The Chimes of Normandy! " In- 
stead we heard the noon whistle. It was tre- 
mendously incongruous. How American humour 
cracks into sardonic ribaldry at the spectacle. 
The French are the least bit unhappy about this 
American humour. They don't entirely see it. 
Once outside of a poor French village near the 
war zone, that had been bombed from the Ger- 
man lines, bombed from the German airships and 
ravaged by fire and sword, some American 
soldiers, looking at the desolation and the ruin of 
the place, so grotesque in its gaping death, so 
hopeless in its pitiful finality, painted on a large 
white board, and nailed on a sign post just at the 
edge of the town this slogan : 

" Watch Commercy Grow ! Boost for the Old 
Town!" 

But in that flash of humour the tragedy of 
Commercy stood revealed clearer than in a flood 
of tears! 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 275 

We came at the end of the morning " to a 
port in France." From there we were to take 
the boat for England. And it seemed to us that 
the whole place was bent on the same errand. 
English soldiers going home on leave jammed 
the streets. They filled the hotels ; they crowded 
into the shops. And the whole town was made 
over for them. " French Spoken Here " was the 
facetious sign someone had stuck on a postcard 
shop near the grey old church on the main thor- 
oughfare. It is curious how the English put their 
trade mark upon the places they occupy. These 
French ports filled with British soldiers look more 
English than England. The English demand 
their own cooking, their own merchandise, their 
own tobacco, their own beer — which is stale, flat 
and unprofitable enough these days — and they 
demand their native speech. When he gets in 
sight of his native land the British Tommy quits 
saying " Donny mo-i, de tabac ! Ma'mselle ! " But 
bellows forth both loud and long, " I say, Lizz, 
gimme some makin's ! and look alive, please ! " 
So when we went to bed in our boat in a French 
port, and slept through a submarine zone, and 
waked up in an English port, there was no vast 
difference in the places. Today Southampton 
and Dover are much like Calais and Havre; for 



276 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

there the English do most congregate. But back 
of the French ports it is all France, and back 
of the English ports is England, and worlds lie 
between them. | England, as one rides through it 
who lives beyoikd the seas, and uses the English 
tongue, always must seem like the unfolding of 
an old, old dream. England gives her step-chil- 
dren the impression that they have seen it all be- 
fore ! And they have ; in Mother Goose, in Dick- 
ens, in Shakespeare, in Thackeray, in Trollope, 
in the songs of British poets, in the landscapes of 
British artists ! At every turn of the road, in 
every face at the window, in every hedgerow 
and rural village is the everlasting reminder that 
we who speak the English tongue are bound with 
indissoluble links of our foster memories from 
the books and the arts, to ways of thinking and 
living and growing in grace that we call Eng- 
lish, It is more than a blood or breed, more even 
than a civilization, is this spiritual inheritance 
that comes from this English soil ; it is the realiza- 
tion in life of a philosophy, the dramatization of 
a human creed. It may be understood, but not 
defined, yet it is as palpable and substantial in 
this earth as any material fact, Germany knows 
what this English philosophy means ; and for half 
a century Germany has been preparing to combat 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 277 

it. J Napoleon knew it, and believed in it, when he 
declared three- fourths of every fact is its spiritual 
value. [France has it, new Russia is struggling 
for it. American life has it as an ancient in- 
heritance, and as we Americans rode through 
the green meadows of England up from the coast 
to London, for ever reviewing familiar scenes and 
faces and aspects of life that we had never seen 
before, we realized how much closer than blood 
or geography or politics men grow who hold the 
same creed^ So Henry, feeling that restraints 
no longer were necessary when we were as near 
home as England, began fussing with an English- 
man about something a speaker had said in parlia- 
ment the day before. We may love the French, 
like the ladies, God bless 'em! But we quarrel 
only with the English. 

When we came to London we saw, even as 
we whirled through the grey old streets, surface 
differences between London and the other capitals 
of the Allies, so striking that they were marked 
contrasts. These differences marked the differ- 
ent reactions of personal loss upon the different 
nations. France expresses her loss in mourning ; 
she relieves her emotions in visible grief. Italy 
does this also; but her losses have been smaller 
than the French losses and Italy's sorrow is less 



278 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

in evidence than is the woe of France. But 
England's master passion in this war is pride. 
" In proud and loving memory " is a phrase that 
one sees a hundred times every day in the obit- 
uary notices of those who have died for England. 
Ambassador Page tells this : He was asking a 
British matron about her family, severally, and 
when he inquired about the son, she replied, 
" Haven't you heard of the new honour that has 
come to us through him? " And to her friend's 
negative she returned : " He has been called 
upon to die for England!" Now that seems 
rather French in its dramatics than British. Yet 
it reflects exactly the British attitude. The 
women wear no mourning. They do not go about 
in bright colours by any means. Bright colours 
in the war distinguish the men. But the women 
do wear dark blues, lavenders and purples, dark 
wine colours and neutral tints of various^hues. 
The shop windows of London are bright. . There 
is a faint re-echo of the time when Great Britain 
said, " Business as usual." The busy life, the 
shopping crowds, the street tHrongs, and the heavy 
streams of trade that flow through the highways 
of London, prove that London still is a great city 
— the greatest city in the world ; and even the war, 
black and dread and horrible as it is, cannot over- 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 2yg 

come London, entirely. (^Something of the fact 
that she is the world's metropolis, more perma- 
nent than the war, somewhat apart from the war, 
and indeed above it, still lingers in the London 
consciousness, however remotel}v 

One must not imagine that London is un- 
changed. It is greatly changed, for the men are 
gone. One sees fewer men in London out of 
uniform than in Paris. And the Londoners one 
does see, all appear to be hurrying about war 
work. But it is the women constantly in evidence 
who have changed the face of London, tWomen 
keep the shops, conduct the busses, run the street 
cars, drive the trucks, sit on the seats of the horse- 
drays, deliver freight, manage railway trains, 
sweep the streets, wait on the tables, pull elevator 
ropes, smash baggage at the railway stations, sell 
tickets, usher at the theaters, superintend factor- 
ies, make munitions, lift great burdens before 
forges, plough, reap, and stack grain and grass 
on farms, herd sheep in waste places, hew wood 
and draw water, and do all of the world's work 
that man has ever done. ( Now, of course, women 
are doing these things elsewhere in the world. 
But London and England are man's domain. 
It seems natural to see the French women, and 
even the Italian women at work. Man is more 



28o Martial Adventures of Henry and Me' 

or less the leisure class on the continent. But 
London is a man's town if on earth there is one, 
and to see women everywhere in London is a 
curious and baffling sight. 

Of course the men are not all dead — " they're 
just away." And they come back on leave. But 
life is not normal. War is abnormal, and there 
is an ever-urging desire of life to assume its 
normal function. So all over Europe we heard 
whispers about the moral break-down among the 
women of England. In England we were asked 
about the dreadful things that were happening 
in France. The things that were happening in 
France were not essentially evil things. One 
could imagine that if God thinks war is necessary 
for the solution of the world's terrible problems, 
He will have no trouble forgiving these lapses that 
follow in the wake of war in France. And in 
England, similarly we found that the moral break- 
down was not a moral break-down at all. The 
abnormal relation of the sexes arising out of war 
produced somewhat the same results that one 
found in France, but in different ways. In 
France too many strange men are billeted in the 
houses of the people. In England, too many 
homes are without men at all. And sheer social 
lonesomeness produces in humanity about the 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 281 

same conditions that arise when people are thrown 
in too close contact. There is a sort of social 
balance of nature, wherein normally desirable re- 
sults are found. The girl working in the muni- 
tion factories, working at top speed eight hours 
a day, filled with a big emotional desire to do her 
full duty to her country every second of the day, 
finds it easy in her eight hours of rest to fall in 
love with a soldier who is going out to offer his 
life for the country for which she is giving her 
strength so gladly. She is not a light woman. 
She is moved by deep and beautiful emotions. 
And if a marriage before he goes out to fight 
is inconvenient or impossible — the war made it 
so, and God will understand. Of course the idle 
woman, the vain woman, the foolish woman in 
these times in England finds ample excuse for 
her folly and vast opportunity to indulge her 
folly in the social turmoil of the war. And she 
is going the pace. Her men are gone, who re- 
strain her, and she has nothing in her head or 
her heart to hold, and she is in evidence. Her 
type always exaggerates its importance, and fools 
people into thinking that her name is Legion, and 
that Mr. Legion is an extensive polygamist, with 
a raft of daughters and sisters and cousins and 
aunts. But she is small in numbers and she is 



282 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

not important. She is merely conspicuous, and 
the moral break-down in England, that one hears 
of in the baited breath of the continent, is an illu- 
sion. 

The elevator girl at Bucklands Hotel in London 
was a bright, black-eyed, good looking woman 
in her late twenties. She wore a green uniform 
with a crimson voile boudoir cap and as the 
American stepped inside the slow-going car, she 
answered his " good morning " with a respectful, 
" good morning, sir." Being a good traveller, 
it seemed to me wise to prepare to while away 
the tedium of the long easy journey to the fourth 
floor with a friendly chat. 

"Any of your relatives in the war?" This 
from me by way of an ice-breaker. 

" Yes, sir, my husband, sir," she replied as 
she grasped the cable. She gave it a pull, and 
added " — or he was, sir. He's home now, sir ! " 

"On leave?" 

" O no, sir, he's wounded, sir — he lost his left 
arm at the shoulder, sir, and he's going down 
to Roehampton today, sir, to see if they can 
teach him some kind of a trade there, sir," an- 
swered the woman. 

The wonders of Roehampton where they re- 
educate the cripples of war and turn them out 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 283 

equipped with such trades as their maimed bodies 
may acquire had been displayed for Henry and 
me the day before. 

"Tell him to try typewriting and stenography, 
one armed men are doing wonders with that down 
at Roehampton. Any children ? " 

" Two, sir," she answered as the elevator ap- 
proached the mezzanine floor, " three and five, 
sir!" 

" Three and five — well, well, Isn't that fine ! 
Aren't you lucky! Tell him to try that stenog- 
raphy ; that will put him in an office and he'll have 
a fine chance to rise there. You must give them 
an education — a good one ; send them to College. 
If they're going to get on in this new world 
they will need every ounce of education you can 
stuff into them. But it will be a splendid thing 
for both of you working for that. Is education 
expensive in England ? " 

" Very, sir. I hardly see how we can do 
it, sir!" 

" That's too bad — now in our country educa- 
tion, from the primer to the university, is abso- 
lutely free. The state does the whole business 
and in my state they print the school books, and 
more than that they give a man a professional 
education, too, without tuition fees — if he wants 



284 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

to become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer 
or a chemist or a school teacher! " 

" Is that so, sir," the cable was running through 
her hands as she spoke. Then she added as the 
elevator passed the second floor, "If we could 
only have that here, sir. If we only could, sir! " 

" Well, it will come. ^That's the next revolu- 
tion you want to start when you women get the 
ballot. Abolish these class schools like Eton and 
Harrow and put the money into better board 
schools. All the kids in my town, and in my 
state, and in my whole section of the country 
go to the common schools. Children should start 
life as equals. There is no snobbery so cruel 
as the snobbery that marks off childhood into 
classes ! When you women vote here, the first 
thing to do is to smash that nonsense. But in 
the meantime keep the kids in school." I 

" We've talked that all over," she answered. 
" And we're certainly going to try. He'll have 
his pension, and I'll have this job and he'll learn a 
trade and I think we can manage, sir ! " The 
" sir " came belated. 

" Go to it, sister, and luck to you," cried her 
passenger as he rose from his bench. The car 
was nearing the fourth floor. 

" We shall," she answered ; " no fear of that." 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 285 

She stopped the car, and they smiled as friends 
as she let him out of the door. " Well — good 
morning," she said as he turned down the cor- 
ridor. The " sir " had left entirely when they 
reached the fourth floor. And all the women of 
Europe, excepting perhaps those still behind the 
harem curtains in Turkey and Germany of whom 
we know nothing, are dropping the servile " sir " 
and are emerging into life at the fourth floor as 
human beings. 

It may be well to digress a moment in this nar- 
rative, from our purely martial adventure, that 
we may consider for a few pages the woman 
question as it is affected by the war. To me, 
if not to Henry, who is highly practical, it 
seemed that in France and Italy, but particularly 
in England, /the new Heaven and the new earth 
that is forming during this war, has created a 
new woman. Indeed the European wom^n of 
the war is almost American in her liberty J 

" European women," said a former American 
grand dame of the old order, sipping tea with 
me at an embassy in the dim lit gorgeousness of a 
mediaeval room, " are of two kinds : Those who 
are being crucified by the war, and those who are 
abusing the new found liberties which war has 
brought them ! " 



286 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

"Liberties?" asked her colloquitor; not 
Henry, He had no patience with these theoreti- 
cal excursions into speculative realms. " Liber- 
ties rather than privileges ? " 

" Yes, liberties. Privileges are temporary," 
purred the lady at the embassy. " They come 
and go, but the whole trouble with this new situa- 
tion is that it is permanent. That also is part of 
the crucifixion of those who suffer under it. 
These women never again can return to the lives 
they have left, to the sheltering positions from 
which the awful needs of this war have driven 
them. The cultivated European woman, who I 
think on the whole was the highest product of 
our civilization, has gone. She has fallen to the 
American level." 

" And the continental mistress system," prod- 
ded her American interviewer, ironically, " will 
it, too, disappear with the departed superiority 
of continental womanhood ? " 

" Yes, the mistress system too — if you want 
to call it a system — and I suppose it is an in- 
stitution — it too will become degraded and 
Americanized." 

" Americanized ? " the middle western eye- 
brows went up, and possibly the middle western 
voice flinched a little. But the wise dowager 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 287 

from Bridgeport, Connecticut, living in Paris on 
New York Central bonds, continued bitterly: 
" Yes, Americanized and vulgarized. The con- 
tinental mistress system is not the nasty arrange- 
ment that you middle class Americans think it is. 
Of course there are European men who acquire 
one woman after another, live with her a few 
months or a few years and forget her. Such 
men are impossible." 

She waved away the whole lady-chasing tribe 
with a contemptuous hand. 

" But the mistress system as we know it in 
Europe is the by-product of a leisure class. 
Men and women marry for business reasons. 
The women have their children to love, the man 
finds his mistress, and clings to her for a life- 
time. He cannot afford to marry her — even 
if he could be divorced ; for he would have to work 
to support her, and be declassed. But he can sup- 
port her on his wife's money and a beautiful life- 
long friendship is thus cherished. It will disap- 
pear when men have to work, and when women 
may go into the world to work without losing 
their social positions. And this new order, this 
making the world safe for democracy, as you call 
it, will rob civilization of its most perfect flower 
— the cultivated woman who has developed under 



288 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

the shelter of our economic system. I might as 
well shock your bourgeois morals now as later. 
So listen to this. Here is one of the ways the 
women of Europe are suffering. I talked to a 
French mother this morning. Her income is 
gone — part of it taxed away, and the rest of it 
wiped away by the Germans in Northern France. 
Her son has only a second lieutenant's income. 
In this chaos she can find no suitable wife for him. 
One who is rich today, tomorrow may be poor, so 
the dear fellow may not marry. And he is look- 
ing for a mistress, and his mother fears he will 
pick up a fool ; for only a fool would take him on 
a lieutenant's salary. And the weeping mother 
told me she would almost as soon that her son 
should have no mistress as to have a fool ! For 
a man's mistress does make such a difference in 
his life! My friend is almost willing to let him 
marry some bright poor girl and go to work! 
The world never will know the suffering the 
women of Europe are enduring in this war ! " 

Now we may switch off that record with the 
snort of woe which Henry gave when he heard 
it. He was trying to tell a Duchess about 
prohibition in Kansas, who had never heard of 
either Kansas or prohibition and who was clearly 
scandalized at what she heard of both. But 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 289 

Henry's other ear was open to what the em- 
bassy ornament was saying to me. On the other 
side of this record of the swan song of the lady 
of the embassy is this record. It is a man's voice. 
The man has risen from an American farm, 
hustled his way into a place where as manager of 
the London factory of an American concern, he 
works several hundred employes. 

" Say, let me tell you something — never 
again! Never again for mine do the men come 
back into our shop. We may let a dozen or so 
of 'em back to handle the big machines. But the 
next size, which we thought that only men could 
handle — never again. And when they come 
back these men will have to work under women 
foremen. We thought when the war took our 
men bosses away that we should have to close the 
shop. But say — never again, I tell you. And 
let me give you a pointer. You wouldn't know 
them girls. When the war broke out they were 
getting ten shillings — about $2.50 a week, the 
best of 'em, and they were mean and slovenly and 
kind of skinny and dirty, and every once in awhile 
one would drop out, and the other girls had a 
great joke about her — you know. And they 
would soak the shop whenever they got a chance ! 
The boss had to keep right after 'em, or they'd 



290 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

soldier on the job or break a machine, or slight 
the product, and they'd lie — why, man, the whole 
works would stand up and lie for each other 
against the shop. It took five men to boss them 
where we have one woman doing it now. And 
say, it ain't the woman boss that's done it. We 
pay 'em more. Them same girls is getting ten 
and twelve and fifteen bucks a week now — 
Lawsee, man — you ought to see 'em ! Dressed 
up to kill ; fat, cheerful, wide-awake ! Goddle- 
mighty, man, you wouldn't know 'em for that 
same measly bunch of grouches we had three 
years ago. And they work for the shop now, 
and not against it. They're different girls. I 
wouldn't-a believed ten dollars a week would-a 
turned the trick; but it's sure done it." 

" Perhaps," suggested his acquaintance, " the 
girls are cheerful and competent because they 
aren't afraid of poverty. Maybe they are mo- 
tived by hope of getting on in the world and not 
motived by the terror of slipping down. Does 
that not make them stand by the shop instead of 
working against it? Isn't it a developed middle 
class feeling that accepts the shop as ' their kind 
of people ' now? " 

" Search me. Cap — I give it up. I just only 
know what I know and see what I see. And 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 291 

never again — you hear me, man — never again 
does our shop go back to men. The ten or 
twelve dollar skirt has made a hit with me! 
Have a cigarette ? " 

The net gain of women in this war, all over 
the world is, of course, a gain in fellowship. 

But after all fellowship will be futile if it does 
not bear fruit. lAnd the first fruit of the fellow- 
ship between men and women in Europe surely 
will be a wider and deeper influence of women 
upon the destinies of the European world. And 
who can doubt who knows woman, that her in- 
fluence will be thrown first and heaviest toward 
a just and lasting peacej 

Often while we were in London, during the 
last days of our stay, when the meaning of the 
war gradually was forming in our minds we 
talked of these things. There are two Henrys — 
one, the owner of a ten-story building in Wichita, 
the editor of a powerful and profitable news- 
paper; the other a protagonist, a sentimental 
idealist. To me this was his greatest charm — 
this infinite variety of Henrys that was forever 
turning up in our discourse. The owner of the 
Beacon building and the publisher of the news- 
paper had small use for my theories about the 
importance of the rise of woman into fellowship 



292 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

with men in the new democratization of the 
world. He refused to see the democratization 
of the world in the war. To him the war meant 
adjustment of boundaries, economic advantages, 
and realignments of political and commercial in- 
fluence on the map of the world. But to the 
other Henry, to the crusader whom I had seen 
many times setting out on the quest for the grail 
in politics, throwing away his political fortunes 
for a cause and a creed as lightly as a man would 
toss aside a cigar stub, the war began to mean 
something more than its military expression. 

And one night as we sat in our room waiting 
for dinner a letter came up from the Eager Soul, 
with some trinkets she had sent over to us by 
messenger to take to her mother in Denver. 
After telling us the news of the hospital, and of 
Auntie and of the wound in the Young Doctor's 
hand, she wrote: 

" O how I hate war — hate it — hate it ! And 
this war of all wars, I hate it worst. It is so 
ruthless, so inexorably cruel ; so utterly meaning- 
less, viewed at close range. Yesterday they 
brought me into Northern Prance, and I spent 
the twilight last night looking over the ruins 
of the local church. It is the most important 
small church in Northern France and contains 



We Consider the Woman Proposition 293 

one of the earliest ribbed vaults in France, they 
say. It was built about iioo, and now the 
thing is smashed. It is what our artillerymen 
call a one-shot church. O the waste of it — 
churches, men, homes, creeds! How many one- 
shot creeds have perished in this hell-fire! Still 
out of the old I suppose the new will come. But 
I have talked to women, to peasant women in 
their homes, to noble women in hospitals; to 
women in their shops and women on the farms, 
and I know that if the new world brings them 
as its heritage, only the enlarged comradeship 
they are taking with men in this time of suffering, 
then one thing is sure : We women will strike an 
awful blow at future wars! The womanhood of 
the past, someway, is like these sad, broken 
churches of France. It is shattered and gone, 
and in its ruins we see its exquisite beauty, its 
ineffable grace, its symbolism of a faith that once 
sufficed. But it will not be restored. We shall 
build new temples; we shall know new women. 
Xbe old had to go, that the new might come. 
[And our new women and our new temples shall 
be dedicated, not merely to faith, not merely to 
beauty, not merely to adoration but to service, to 
service and comradeship in the world." I 

As he finished reading the letter Henry's eyes 



294 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

glistened. Its emotion had awakened the cru- 
sader, who said gently : " Well, Bill, I presume 
fTTis the potential mother in every woman that 
makes her worth while. And if this war will 
only harness motherhood to the public conscience, 
the net gain will be worth the war, however it is 
settled/^ 



CHAPTER VIII 

IN WHICH WE DISCOVER " A NEW HEAVEN AND A 
NEW EARTH " 

FINALLY our talk left the war and its mean- 
ing, and we fell to wondering how the 
Young Doctor's hand was coming on, and 
we thought of the Eager Soul, too, standing so 
wistfully between love and death and the picture 
of the Young Doctor sitting in the garden 
among the flowers of early autumn, more poet 
than soldier or doctor, came to both of us as we 
talked and then Henry stooped to the floor and 
picked up two folded sheets of paper. Clearly 
they had dropped from the envelope sent to us 
by the Eager Soul. He opened one and re- 
marked : 

" Why, Bill, it's poetry. She's written here 
on the margin, ' Verses by our Doctor friend. 
I thought you'd like to see them. See other 
sheet for melody to suit. It was the melody he 
tried to whistle that night. He wrote them for 
295 



296 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

me to fit the Doctor's words.' " Then Henry 
unfolded the other sheet; and there, sure enough, 
was the air, evidently copied by the girl from the 
melody written by the Gilded Youth. And 
clearly it was the theme of the Tschaicovski 
melody from the first movement of the Sixth 
Symphony, that dominated the air.^ The fine 
thoroughbred nerve of him, trying to signal that 
air back to her, and to play the game of courage 
to us ! Henry read the verses ; they were headed 
" A Soldier's Song." They were very much 
such rhymes as we wrote when we were young. 
They ran: 

Love, though these hands, that rest in thine so dear, 
Back into dust may crumble with the year; 
Love, though these lips, that meet thy lips so true, 
Soon may be grass that stores the morning dew — 
O Love, know well, that this fond heart of mine, 
It shall be always, always — thine ! 

Love, though our dreams shall have no hope but this; 
Love, though our faith shall be our rarest bliss; 
Love, though the years may bring their death and chill. 
Love, though our blood shall lose its passion, still — 
Still, Love, know well that this heart is divine. 
It shall be always — always, thine ! 

iFor the melody which the Gilded Youth wrote to the 
Young Doctor's verses the reader should see appendix 
" A." 



" A New Heaven and a New Earth " 297 

Henry sat holding the sheet and looking through 
the wall of the room in Buckland's hotel across 
twenty years, down an elm-shaded path in the 
little town of Baldwin, Kansas — thousands of 
miles and seemingly thousands of years away! 

" Well," he sighed. " In the note here she's 
got her he's badly mixed. But we know what 
she means. And I don't blame them ; any boy in 
his twenties ought to go singing, with one voice 
or another, after such a girl!" 

And then we knew what the Young Doctor 
was doing there in the garden among the adoring 
flowers. He was writing those verses. And, 
we in our forties, after such things have passed, 
were sitting in a commonplace room in a com- 
fortable hotel, five hundred miles from the battle 
and twenty years from the primrose path, trying 
to imagine it all. And like Stephen Blackpool in 
Dickens' " Hard Times " about all we could make 
of it was that it was a mess ! They were both so 
remote, the love affair that had followed us over 
Europe, and the war which we had followed so 
wearily. The love affair was of course a look 
backward, for us, to days " when lutes were 
touched and songs were sung " ; but the war and 
all its significance stretched ahead. It portended 
change. Forf change always follows war. J 



298 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

Yet life, in spite of the current of war twisting 
so many things askew, does proceed in England 
calmly, and in something like order. As we 
looked back upon our London experience it 
seemed to Henry and me that we were hurrying 
from luncheons to teas and teas to dinners and 
from dinners to the second act of good shows all 
the time. For in London we had no Red Croi?s 
duties. We were on our way home, and people 
were kind to us, and best of all we could speak 
the language — after a fashion — and understand 
in a general way what was going on. We had 
dined at two American embassies on the conti- 
nent and had worn our tail coats. Of course Red 
Cross uniforms were proper evening regalia at 
any social function. But someway a flannel shirt 
and a four-in-hand tie — even a khaki coloured 
tie, did not seem to Henry and me de rigueur. 
We weren't raised that way and we couldn't 
come to it. So we wore our tails. We noticed 
in France and Italy that other men wore dinner 
coats, and we bemoaned our stupidity in bringing 
our tails and leaving our dinner coats in New 
York. We fancied in our blindness that on the 
continent no one noticed the difference. But in 
England, there doubt disappeared. Whenever 
we went to an English dinner, in our tails, some 



" A New Heaven and a New Earth " 299 

English ladyship through a lorgnette or a spy- 
glass of some kind gave us the once-over with 
the rough blade of her social disapproval and we 
felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped from a 
tacky party and dropped into a grand ball. But 
we couldn't help it. How should we have known, 
without our wives to pack our trunks for us in 
New York, that tails had atrophied in European 
society and that uniforms and dinner coats had 
taken their place. 

But other things have disappeared from Great 
Britain since war began, and Henry was doomed 
to walk the island vainly looking for the famed 
foods of old England. All through Italy and 
France, where onion soup and various pastes were 
served to us, Henry ate them, but in a fond hope 
that when we got to England he would have some 
of the " superior comestibles " which a true lover 
of Dickens had a right to expect. The French 
were given to ragouts and Latin translations of 
Mulligan stews, and braised veal smothered in 
onions and carrots and a lot of staple and fancy 
green groceries, and these messed dishes irritated 
Henry. He is the kind of an old-fashioned man 
who likes to take his food straight. If he eats 
onions, he demands that they shall be called 
onions, or if they serve him carrots, he must know 



300 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

specifically that he is eating carrots, and he wants 
his potatoes, mashed, baked, boiled, or fried and 
no nonsense about it. Similarly he wants his 
veal served by itself, and when they bring him a 
smoking brown casserole of browned vegetables, 
browned gravy and browned meat, he pokes his 
fork into it, sniffs, " another cat mess," pushes 
it aside and asks for eatable food! So all over 
the continent he was bragging about what he was 
going to do to " the roast beef of old England," 
and was getting ready for Yorkshire pudding 
with it. It was sweet to hear Henry's honest 
bark at spaghetti and fish-salads, bay deep- 
mouthed welcome to Sam Weller's " 'am and 
weal pie," and even Pickwick's " chops and tomato 
sauce," and David Copperfield's toasted muffins, 
as we drew near the chalk cliffs of England. 
Also he was going to find what an " eel pie " 
was, and he had a dozen Dickensonian dishes that 
he proposed to explore, dishes whose very names 
would make a wooden Indian's mouth water. 
But when he got there the cupboard was bare. 
England was going on rations. Fats were scarce, 
sugars were rare, starches were controlled by the 
food board. And who could make a currant 
tart without these ? He dropped two bullet-sized 
brown biscuits with a hazelnut of butter under 




And we felt like prize boobs suddenly kidnapped from 
a tacky party and dropped into a grand ball 



'"'' A New Heaven and a New Earth " 303 

his vest the first three minutes of our first break- 
fast and asked for another round, after he had 
taken mine. 

" That's your allowance, sir," said the waitress, 
and money would buy no more. 

He noticed a cube of sugar by his coffee cup; 
that was his allowance of sugar. We went out to 
lunch. Henry ordered the roast beef of old Eng- 
land at the best club in London and got a pink 
shaving, escorted in by two boiled potatoes and 
a hunk of green cabbage, boiled without salt or 
pork. And for dessert we had a sugarless, lard- 
less whole-wheat-flour tart! It puckered his 
mouth like a persimmon. It fell to me to explain 
to Mr. H. G. Wells, who gave the luncheon, that 
Henry had just come from the continent, where 
he had scorned the food, and one could see from 
the twinkle in Mr. Wells's eyes that he was going 
to put Henry in a book. And he certainly was a 
hero during those London days — the hero of a 
great disillusion. Of course the British cooking 
was good. The English are splendid cooks, and 
they were doing their best; but Henry's picture 
of the great boar's head triumphantly borne 
into the hall on the shoulders of four stout but- 
lers, and his notion of the blazing plum pudding as 
large as a hassock, and his preconceived idea of 



304 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

England as Dickens's fat boy forever stuffing and 
going to sleep again, had to be entirely revised. 
For if the English are proud of the way they 
conceal the bitterness of their sorrow^ in this war, 
also they have a vast pride in the way they are 
sacrificing their creature comforts for it. In 
Latin countries there is more or less special 
privilege. But in England, the law is the law and 
men glory in its rigours by obeying it in proud 
self-sacrifice. If our dinners sometimes were 
Spartan in simplicity we found the talk ample, 
refreshing and filling. We, however, had some 
trouble with our " Who's Who." One evening 
they sat me opposite a handsome military man 
who talked of airships and things most wonder- 
fully and it took me three days to learn that he 
was the authority on air fighting in Europe! He 
was a Lord of somewhere, and Earl of something 
and a Duke of somewhat — all rolled into one. 
Henry hooted at me for two days. But finally 
he gave me some comfort. " At least," he said, 
" you are as well-known in London as your 
Duke's mixture is in Emporia, and London is a 
bigger town ! " Then it came Henry's turn. At 
our very grandest dinner they sat Henry between 
Lord Bryce and one of the most distinguished 
men of contemporary English letters, Henry 



"A New Heaven and a New Earth" 305 

shone that night as he never shone before and 
when Henry turns on his talk he is a wizard. 
Meredith Nicholson, who has heard Henry talk 
at a dinner, in a recent number of Scribners 
magazine, said of him : " He's the best talker 
I've ever heard. It was delightful to listen to 
discourse so free, so graphic in its characteriza- 
tion, so coloured and flavoured with the very 
soil," and that night at the English dinner, all 
of Henry's cylinders were hitting and he took 
every grade without changing gears. But my 
ears were eager for the man on Henry's right. 
He told some stories; my neck craned toward 
them. Henry returned the Scotch stories with 
Kansas stories and held the table. 

Then going home in the taxi Henry, recalling 
his dinner companion, said : " Bill, who was that 
little man on my left, that man they called 
Barrie ! " 

It seemed impossible. Yet those were Henry's 
very words. 

" Henry, Henry, have you never heard of 
* Peter Pan,' nor ' The Little Minister,' nor ' Sen- 
timental ' — " his friend's answer got no further. 
Henry's snort of shame almost stopped the 
taxi. 

" No, Bill — no — not that. Well, for Heav- 



3o6 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

en's sake! and I sat by him all evening braying 
like a jack. Bill — Bill, you won't ever tell this 
in Wichita, will you? " 

So it must remain forever a secret ! 

That was a joyful hour for me, but the next 
day, Henry had his laugh. We came in from tea 
and found a card on the table in the snug little 
room near the elevator, which passes for a hotel 
ofHce in London. The card was from Lord 
Bryce inviting us to tea the next afternoon. 
It fell to Henry's lot to go out for the day in the 
country, and to me to lunch with Granville Bark- 
er. So half -past four saw me rushing into the 
hotel from a taxi, which stood waiting outside, 
and throbbing up a two-pence every minute. 
Then this dialogue occurred. 

From me : " Is Mr. Allen in his room? " 

From the hall boy : " He is, sir; shall I go for 
him, sir? " 

From m_e: "If you will, please, and tell him 
I'm in an ungodly hurry, and we have a taxi at the 
door chewing up money like a cornsheller ! " 

The hall boy had to find someone to go on 
watch. Time was moving. The tea was at five. 
The Bryce apartment was a mile away, and the 
chug of that taxi by the door moved me im- 
pulsively toward the elevator. But the elevator 



'' A New Heaven and a New Earth " 307 

was still three steps away, when the manager of 
the hotel sauntered out from a side door, looked 
me over leisurely, and asked blandly : 

" You'll be going to tea with Lord Bryce this 
afternoon — I presume ! " 

My hand was on the elevator button jabbing it 
fiercely, and my lips replied, " Yes — yes — 
say — Do you know whether Mr. Allen is in 
our room? It is getting late and he must hurry 
or—" 

The manager continued to look me over still 
leisurely, then he smiled persuasively, but spoke 
firmly; realizing that something would have to 
be done for the good name of his hotel : " Well 
now, sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brown 
shoes to Lord Bryce's tea, would you, Mr. 
White?" And while that taxi ground out two 
shillings, black shoes slowly but nervously en- 
veloped two Emporia feet, while Henry stood 
by and chortled in ghoulish Wichita glee ! 

But if we made a rather poor fist of our social 
diversions, at least we had a splendid time at the 
London shows. And then there was always the 
prospect of an exciting adventure getting home 
after the performance was over. The hotel gen- 
erally found a taxi which took us to the theater. 
But once there we had to skirmish for ourselves 



3o8 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

and London is a big town, and hundreds of thou- 
sands of Londoners are hunting taxis at eleven at 
night, and they are hard to catch. So we gen- 
erally had the fun of walking back to Brook 
Street in the dark. And it is dark in London 
toward midnight. Paris is merely gloomy. 
Rome is a bit somber, but London is as black as 
the inside of your hat. For London has been 
bombed and bombed by the German airmen, until 
London in the prevailing mist which threatens 
fog becomes mere murk. Night after night we 
wandered the crooked streets inquiring our way 
of strangers, some of whom were worse lost than 
we ; one night we took a Londoner in charge and 
piloted him to Leicester Square; and then got 
lost ourselves finding Piccadilly and Regent 
Street ! So that whenever we went out after din- 
ner we were never without dramatic excitement, 
even if it was not adequately supplied by the 
show. The London taste in shows seems to 
sheer away from the war. In the autumn last 
past but two shows had a war motive: One 
" General Post," a story of the fall of caste from 
English life during the war, telling how a tailor 
became a general ; the other " The Better 'Ole," 
a farce comedy, with a few musical skits in it, 
staged entirely " at the front." " The Better 




" Well now, Sir, you wouldn't be wearing those brown 
shoes to Lord Bryce's tea, would you, Mr. White ? " 



''' A New Heaven and a New Earth " 311 

'Ole " could be put on in any American town and 
the fun would raise the roof ! There is no story 
to it ; the show is but a series of dialogues to illus- 
trate Bairns father's cartoons. 

A soldier comes splashing down the trench. 
His comrade cries, " Say, Alf, take yer muddy 
feet out o' the only water we got to sleep in." 
Again a soldier squats shivering with fear in a 
shell hole, while the bombs are crashing over 
him, and dirt threatens to bury him. A comrade 
looks in and to his captious remarks the squat- 
ting soldier answers, "If you knows where 
there's a better 'ole, go to it ! " Three men 
seated on a plum jam box during a terrific bom- 
bardment. Trees are falling, buildings crum- 
bling, the landscape heaving, and Bert says, " Alf 
— we'll miss this old war wen it's over ! " As 
the shells strike nearer and nearer and a great 
crater yawns at their feet they crawl into it, are 
all but buried alive by the dirt from another 
shell, and Bert exclaims, " Say, Alf, scare me — 
I got the 'iccoughs!" And so it goes for a 
whole evening, while Bert, making love to an 
interminable string of girls at each place where 
he is billeted at the front, gives away scores of 
precious lockets with his mother's hair in them, 
and Alf tries forever, unavailingly, to make his 



312 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

cigarette lighter work, and Old Bill dreams of 
his wife at home who keeps a " pub " ! 

The prohibitionist in America would probably 
insist that she keep a soda fountain or a woman's 
exchange; but no other alterations would be 
needed to get the play over the footlights in any 
English speaking town on the globe. 

The British soldiers crowd the house where 
" The Better 'Ole " is given, but their friends 
don't like it. The raw rollick of the game with 
death, which is really Shakespearean in its di- 
rectness and its horse play — like the talk of the 
soldiers in " Henry IV " or the chaffing of the 
grave-diggers in " Hamlet," or the common peo- 
ple in any of Shakespeare's plays, offends the 
British home-staying sense of propriety, and old 
ladies and gentlemen write to the Times about it. 
But the boys in khaki jam the theater and howl 
their approval. 

Curiously enough in musical programs one 
finds no prejudice against German music in Lon- 
don as one finds it in Paris. To get Beethoven 
in Paris one had to lower the windows, close the 
shutters, pull down the shades and pin the cur- 
tains tight. At the symphony concerts in Lon- 
don one can hear not only Beethoven, but Wag- 
ner, who is almost modern in his aggressive Teu- 



'^^ A New Heaven and a New Earth" 313 

tonism. But the English have Httle music of 
their own, and so long as they have to be borrow- 
ing they seem to borrow impartially of all their 
neighbours, the French, the Slavs, the Germans, 
and the Italians. Indeed, even when British opin- 
ion of Russia was at its ebb, the London Sym- 
phony Orchestra put in an afternoon with Tschai- 
covsky's Fourth Symphony. And yet if, in a few 
months we could form even a vague notion of 
the public minds of England, and of France, one 
might say that England seemed more implacable 
than France. In France, where one heard no 
music but French and Italian music in the con- 
certs, at the parks, in opera, one heard a serious 
discussion going on among school teachers about 
the history to be taught after the war. 

Said one side : " Let's tell the truth about this 
war and its horrors. Let's tell of murdered 
women and children, of ravished homes, of pil- 
laged cities, of country-sides scourged clear down 
to their very milestones ! Let's tell how German 
rapacity for land began the war, and kept it up 
to its awful end." 

Says the other side : " Germany is our perma- 
nent neighbour. Our children will have to live 
with ■ Germany, and our children's children to the 
end of time. War is a horrible thing. Hate 



314 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

breeds war. Why not then let the story of this 
war and its barbarities die with this generation? 
Why should we for ever breed hate into the heart 
of our people to grow eternally into war? " 

England has no such questions in her mind. 
England will surely tell the truth and defy the 
devil. But the Briton in matters of music and 
the other arts is like 'Omer when he " smote 'is 
bloomin' lyre"; the Briton also will go and take 
what he may require, without much sentiment in 
the matter. 

jBut the things that roll off the laps of the gods, 
after humanity has put its destinies there, some- 
times are startlingly different from the expected 
fruits of victory. We fight a war for one thing, 
win the war and get quite another thing. The 
great war now waging began in a dispute over 
spheres of influence, market extensions. Places in 
the Sun and Heaven knows what of that sort of 
considerations. Great changes in these matters, of 
course, must come out of the war. But bound- 
aries and markets will fluctuate with the decades 
and centuries. The important changes that will 
come out of this war — assuming that the Allies 
win it — will be found in the changed relations 
of men. The changes will be social and eco- 
nomic and they will be institutional and lasting. 



"A New Heaven and a New Earth" 315 

For generally speaking-, such changes as approach 
a fair adjustment of the complaints of the " have 
nots " against the " haves " in life, are permanent 
changes, Kjangs, overlords, potentates, politi- 
cians, capitalists, high priests — masters of va- 
rious kinds — find it difficult to regain lost privi- 
leges and perquisites. And in this war Germany 
stands clearly for the " haves." If Germany 
wins, autocracy will hood its losing ground all 
over the world. For the same autocracy in Ber- 
lin lives in Wall Street, and in the " city " in 
London, and in the caste and class interests of 
Italy and France. But junkerdom in Germany 
alone among the nations of the earth rests on the 
divine right of kings that is the last resort of 
privilege. In America we have the democratic 
weapons to break up our plutocracy whenever we 
desire to do so. In England they are breaking 
up their caste and economic privileged classes 
rapidly. In France and Italy junkerdom is a 
motheaten relic. And when junkerdom in Ger- 
many is crushed, then at least the world may be- 
gin the new era, may indeed begin to fight itself 
free. In the lands of the Allies the autocracy 
will be weakened by an allied victory. In Ger- 
many the junkers will be strong if they win the 
war, and their strength will revive junkerism all 



3i6 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

over the earth. If the AlHes win, it will weaken 
junkerdom everywhere. Germany, it is true, 
treats her working classes better than some of 
the Allies treat their working people. But it is 
with the devilish wisdom of a wise slaveholder, 
who sees profit in fat slaves. The workers get 
certain legal bonuses. They have economic priv- 
ileges, not democratic rights of free men under 
German rule. And the roaring of the big guns 
out at the front, seemed to Henry and me to be 
the crashing walls of privilege in the earth, f 

Of course in this war, while some of the strange 
things one sees and hears in Europe may pass 
with the dawn of peace — woman, for instance, 
may return indoors and come out only on election 
day, yet unquestionably most of the changes in 
economic adjustment have come to stay. They 
are the most important salvage that will come out 
of the wreck and waste of this war./ InEjigland, 
for instance, the new ballot reform laws are fun- 
damental changes. They provide virtually for 
universal manhood suffrage and suffrage for 
women over thirty upon something of the same 
terms as those provided for men. So revolution- 
ary are the political changes in England that after 
the war, it is expected — conceded is hardly too 
strong a word, that the first political cabinet to 



"A New Heaven and a New Earth" 317 

arise after the coalition cabinet goes, will be a 
labour cabinet/ Certainly if labour does not 
actually dominate the British government, labour 
will control it indirectly. lAnd the labour gains 
during the war will not be lost. Wages in 
England, and for that matter in most of the allied 
countries are now being regulated by state 
ordinance and not by competitive rates. " The 
labour market " has passed with the slave market. 
Wages are based not upon supply and demand in 
labour, but upon the cost of what seems to be 
a decent standard of subsistence. This change, 
of course, is fundamental. It marks a new order 
in the world. And the labour party of England 
recently adopted a program which provides not 
merely for the decent living wage for workmen, 
independent of the " labour market," but also 
provides for the democratic control of industry: 
national railways, national mines, national 
electricity, national housing, and national land 
tenure. And as if that were not enough the de- 
mands of the labour party include the perma- 
nent control of the prices of all the necessaries 
of life, without relation to profits and independ- 
ent of supply and demand. Such things have 
been done during the war, and in a crisis. 
Labour demands that they be done permanently. 



3i8 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

And still further to press home its claims upon 
society, British labour demands a system of taxa- 
tion levied conspicuously and frankly at the rich 
to bring their incomes and their holdings only to 
a moderate rise above the common level — a rise 
in some relation to the actual differences of mind 
and heart and soul and service between men, and 
not a difference based on birth and inheritance 
and graft and grabbing. It is, of course, revo- 
lution. But Labour now has political rights in 
England, and has time and again demonstrated 
that it has a majority in every part of the United 
Kingdom, and it is closely organized and rather 
determined, and probably will have its way. In 
France and in Italy where for ten years the 
Socialists have more or less controlled assemblies 
and named cabinets, demands like those of the 
English are being made. 

And when the Allies win it will not be so much 
a change in geography that shall mark off the 
world of the nineteenth century from the world 
of the twentieth, as the fundamental social and 
economic changes in society. The hungry guns 
out there at the front have eaten away the whole 
social order that was ! 

For conditions in this war are new in the world. 
In every other war, soldiers have dreamed high 



"A New Heaven and a New Earth" 319 

dreams of their rewards. But they have not 
taken them — chiefly because their dreams were 
impractical, somewhat because the dreams that 
were practical were not held by a majority; or to 
some extent because if they were held by a ma- 
jority the majority had no power. Now] — even 
Henry admitted this is no mere theory — <^e 
have a new condition. In Europe for two dec- 
ades the labour problem has been carefully 
thought out. Labour is in a numerical majority 
and the majority has political power and political 
purpose. Labour has been asking and getting 
about the same things in every country. It has 
been asking and getting a broader political con- 
trol in order to assume a firmer economic control. 
But one day we read in the London papers 
of an incident that indicated how far the state 
control of industry has gone in England. A 
strike occurred and an important industry was 
threatened — not over wages, not over hours, not 
over shop conditions, but over the recognition of 
the union. Pig-headed managing directors stood 
firm against recognizing the unions. Then the 
government stepped in and settled the strike and 
has compelled the owners of the plant to remove 
the managing director and to put in men satis- 
factory to the workers! YLabour now is begin- 



320 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

ning all over Europe to formulate a demand for 
a place in the directorate of industries. This 
place in the directorate of industries is demanded 
that labour may have an intelligent knowledge 
of the profits of a business so that labour honestly 
may share those profits with capital. That this 
condition is coming in Europe no one will deny 
who sees the rush of events toward a redistribu- 
tion of the profits of industry. 

Having the vision and having the power to get 
what it desires, only the will to use the power 
is needed. And that will is motived by the great 
shadow that is hanging over the world — the 
shadow of public debt in this war. Someone 
must pay that debt. Heretofore war debts have 
fallen heaviest upon the poor. Those least able 
to pay have paid the most. But those least able 
to pay are coming out of this war too smart for 
the old adjustment of the debt. Education, for 
the past fifty years has made a new man, who will 
refuse to be over-taxed. During our visit to the 
front the soldiers were forever saying to Henry 
and me : " We have offered our lives. Those 
who stayed at home must give up their riches." 
And as we went about in England we were al- 
ways hearing about the wisdom of a heavy con- 
fiscatory tax. Among the conservatives them- 



"A New Heaven and a New Earth" 321 

selves who presumably have a rather large share 
of the national wealth, there is a serious feeling 
that immediately after the war a tax-measure 
should be passed which would at once confiscate 
a certain portion of the property of the country 
— one hears different per cents discussed ; some 
declare that ten per cent is enough, while others 
hold that it will require 25 per cent. This con- 
fiscatory tax is to be collected when any piece of 
property changes hands, and the accruing sum is 
to be used for paying off the national debt, or a 
considerable portion of it at once. The situation 
is completely changed from that which followed 
the Napoleonic wars, where war taxes fell largely 
upon labour. So in self-preservation, capital is 
considering turning over a part of its property to 
the state to avoid the slow and disintegratmg 
grind that otherwise inevitably must come. 

A curious side light on the way in which 
democracy is conducting this war is found in the 
way by which it finances the war. The great 
debt of the war, piled up mountain high, is of 
course, converted into bonds. These bonds, 
similar to our Liberty Bonds, have been pur- 
chased not exclusively by the bankers as in 
former wars, but by the people of the middle 
class and of the labouring class. Thus democ- 



322 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

racy has its savings in war bonds, which would 
be wiped out by an indemnity to Germany, but 
would be greatly inflated by an Allied victory; 
and where the treasure is, there the heart is! 
Perhaps it was political strategy which placed the 
war bonds in the hands of the people. But more 
than likely it was financial necessity. For the 
tremendous financial burden of this war was too 
great for the investing classes to bear unaided. 
So even the financing of the war has been more 
or less democratized. In fact, the whole conduct 
of the war is democratized/ 

One of the corroborating proofs that this is 
after all not a king's war, but a people's war, is 
found in the kind of stories they were forever 
telling Henry and me about the war. They are 
not hero stories. Mostly they are funny stories, 
more or less gently guying the " pomp and cir- 
cumstance of glorious war," for it is the proud 
boast of the British army that this is a noncoms' 
war. Doubtless the stories have small basis in 
fact, but the currency of these blithe stories re- 
flects the popular mind. Thus they say that when 
General Haig and his staff came down to re- 
view the Canadian troops and pin a carload of 
hardware on their men for bravery in battle, 
medals of one sort and another, the Canadian 



" A New Heaven and a New Earth " 323 

General lined his huskies up, and as the staff ap- 
proached he cried anxiously, " Say, boys — here 
he comes. Now see if you can't stand to atten- 
tion, and for Heaven's sake, fellows, don't call me 
Bill while he is here! " And then they say that 
after the heavy hardware and shelf goods were 
distributed a British officer lifted his voice to say : 
" Men, you have written a brave page upon our 
history. No more splendid courage than yours 
ever has been known in the annals of our proud 
race. But with such magnificent courage, why 
can you not display other soldierly qualities. 
Why are you so loose in your discipline? Why 
don't you treat your officers with more respect? " 
And in the pause a voice from the ranks re- 
plied, " They're not a bad lot, sir. We like 'em 
all right. But we have 'em along for mascots ! " 
The French also seem to have their easy-going 
ways. For current smoking room fiction relates 
that last spring after a troop of French soldiers 
had been hauled out to be shot for refusing to go 
into battle under orders, a whole division revolted 
and demanded new officers — and got new 
officers — before they would move forward. 
And the same smoking room fiction says that in 
the revolt the men were right and the officers 
wrong. 



324 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

" Why," asked a new English officer of some 
Russian troops who had made a splendid assault 
on a German position in the spring of 191 7, an 
assault that required high courage and great sol- 
dierly skill, " why did you men all lift up your 
hands just before the charge was made? " The 
noncom grinned and answered, " We were taking 
a vote upon the matter of the charge, sir ! " 

In a theater on the boulevards in Paris recently 
a hit was made by introducing a stage scene show- 
ing the princes and nobility in poverty, looking 
down from a gallery at the top of the theater, 
on the rich working people in the boxes below; 
the princes and nobility were singing a doleful 
ditty and dancing a sad dance about the changed 
circumstances that were glooming up the world. 

Simultaneously across the channel in England, 
they were telling this one. Lord Milner, who in 
Germany would be one of the All Highest of the 
High Command, was calling at an English house 
where the children were not used to nobility. 
They heard their father refer to Lord Milner as 
" my lord." And one child edged up to him in 
awe and asked, " O sir, were you indeed born in 
a manger ? " The All Highest smiled and quoth 
in reply, " No, my child, no, I was not born in 



''A New Heaven and a New Earth" 325 

a manger, but if they keep on taxing me, I fear 
I shall die in one! " 

The Italians have high hopes of harnessing 
their nine millions of horsepower in Alpine water- 
falls, running their state-owned railroads and 
public utilities with it, and introducing electricity 
as an industrial power into Italian homes, thus 
bringing back to the homes of the people the home 
industries like weaving which steam took away 
a century ago. But this is only a dream. Yet 
sometimes dreams do come true. And dreams 
are wishes unexpressed ; and in this day of demo- 
cratic power, a wish with a ballot behind itj3e- 
comes a will, and soon hardens into a fact. { The 
times are changing. But of course human nature 
remains much the same. Men under a given 
environment will do about the same kind of things 
under one set of circumstances. But we should 
not forget in our computations that laws, customs, 
traditions, the distribution of wealth, make an en- 
tirely new environment, and that circumstances 
are not the same when environment differs. 
That the surroundings of those people known col- 
lectively as " the poor " have changed, and 
changed permanently by the war, no one who sees 
them in Europe can doubt. They are well-fed, 



326 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

well-housed, and are determined to be well-edu- 
cated. They know that they can use their ballots 
to get their share of the wealth they produce. 
They are never going to be content again with 
crusts. They are motived now by hope rather 
than by fear, and they are going to react strangely 
during the next ten years on the social structure 
of this old world. But even the new majority 
will not change everything of course. Grass will 
grow, water will run down hill, smart men will 
lead fools, wise men will have the places of 
honour and power, in proportion to the practi- 
cality of their wisdom. But for all that, we shall 
have in a rather large and certainly in a keenly in- 
teresting degree a new heaven and a new earth. 1 

Now as these speculations upon the new order 
came to us as our journey drew to its close in 
England, the war seemed slowly to change its 
meaning. It became something more than a con- 
flict ; it seemed to be a revolution ~ world-wide, 
and all encompassing. Then we thought of 
*' the front " in new terms. 

We realized that behind the curtain in 
Germany, a despotic will, scientifically guided, 
is controlling the food, the munitions, the as- 
sembling of men and materials for this war. But 
on this side of the German curtain at the " front " 



''' A New Heaven and a New Earth " 327 

which we knew, a democratic purpose is doing 
these things. The view of that democratic pur- 
pose at work, to me at least, was my chief trophy 
of the war. The laws which make food conser- 
vation possible, which direct shipping, mobilize 
railroads, control industry, regulate wages, pre- 
scribe many of the habits of life to fit the war, all 
rise out of the experience of the people. There 
is a vast amount of the " consent of the gov- 
erned " in this whole war game, so far as the 
Allies are concerned. And as it is in democratic 
finance, so also is it in the taste and talent and 
capacity for war. That also is democratic. 
What a wide range of human activity is massed 
in this business of war! 

For days and days after we left the continent, 
in our minds we could see armies moving into 
the trenches somewhere along the " far flung 
battle line," and other armies moving out. The 
picture haunted us. It seemed to me a cine- 
matograph of democracy. For the change of 
an army division from the trenches, tired, worn 
and bedraggled, moving wearily to its station of 
rest, with another army division, fresh and eager, 
moving up from its station of rest to the front, 
is indeed a social miracle. It is a fine bit of 
human machinery. So in terms of our modern 



328 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

democracy it may be well to review the intermin- 
able panorama of this democratic war. Fifty 
years ago it would have been a memorable 
achievement. Waterloo itself was not such a 
miracle. Yet somewhere in this war, this wonder 
is done every day and no record is made of it. 
Imagine hundreds of miles of wide, white roads, 
hard-surfaced and graded for the war, leading to 
a sector of the line. To make and keep these 
roads, itself is a master's job. Imagine the roads 
filled all day with two long lines of trucks, pass- 
ing a;nd repassing; one line carrying its guns and 
camp outfit, its whole paraphernalia of war, go- 
ing to the battle front in the hills ; another never- 
ceasing procession with its martial impedimenta 
coming out of the hills to rest. A few horses 
hauling big gun carriages straggle through the 
dust. Here and there, but rarely, is a group of 
marching men — generally men singing as they 
march. Occasionally a troop of German prison- 
ers marching with the goose step, comes swinging 
along carrying their shovels at a martial angle — 
road menders — which proves that we are more 
than thirty kilos from the firing line; now and 
then a camp-kitchen rattles past. But ever in 
one's ears is the rich rumble of trucks, recalling 
the voluptuous sound of the circus wagon on the 



"A New Heaven and a New Earth" 329 

village street. But always there are two great 
circus parades, one going up, one coming down. 
Lumbering trucks larger than city house-moving 
vans whirl by in dust clouds ; long — interminably 
long — lines of these trucks creak, groan and 
rumble by. Some of the trucks are mysteriously 
non-committal as to their contents — again repro- 
ducing the impression of the circus parade. 
Probably they hide nothing more terrible than 
tents or portable ice plants. But most of the 
trucks that go growling up and come snarling 
down the great white roads, bear men; singing 
men, sleeping men, cheering men, unshaved men, 
natty men, eating men,,,smoking men, old men 
and young men, but always cheerful men — pri- 
vate soldiers hurrying about the business of war ; 
to their trenches or from their trenches, but al- 
ways cheerful. Sometimes a staff officer's car, 
properly caparisoned, shuttles through the line 
like a flashing needle; sometimes a car full of 
young officers of the line tries to nose ahead of 
the men of the regiment, but rather meekly do 
these youngsters try to sneak their advantage, as 
one swiping an apple; no great special privilege 
is theirs. Interminable lines of truck-mounted 
guns rattle along, each great gun festively named, 
as for instance, " The Siren," or " Baby " or 



330 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

" The Peach " or " The Cooing Dove." Curious 
snaky looking objects all covered with wiggly 
camouflage — some artist's pride — are these 
guns, and back of them or in front of them and 
around them, clank huge empty ammunition 
wagons going out, or heavy ones coming in. At 
short intervals along the road are repair furnaces, 
and near them a truck or a gun carriage, or an 
ambulance that has turned out for slight repairs. 
In the village are great stores of gasoline and 
rubber, huge quantities of it assembled by some 
magic for the hour's urgent need. 

What a marvel of organization it is ; no con- 
fusion, no distraught men, no human voice raised 
except in ribald song. From the ends of the 
earth have come all these men, all these muni- 
tions, all this food and tents and iron and steel 
and rubber and gas and oil. And there it cen- 
ters for the hour of its need on this one small 
sector of the front; indeed on every small sec- 
tor of the long, long trail, these impedimenta of 
war come hurrying to their deadly work. And 
it is not one man; not one nation even, not one 
race, nor even one race kindred that is assembling 
this endless caravan of war. It is a spirit that 
is calling from the vasty deep of this world's 
treasure, unto material things to rise, take shape 



"A New Heaven and a New Earth" 331 

and gather at this tryst with death. It is the 
spirit of democracy calling across the world. 
The supreme councils of the Allies — what 
are they? They change, form and reform. 
Generals, field marshals, staff officers in gold 
lace, cabinets, presidents, puppet kings, and God 
knows what of those who strut for a little time 
in their pomp of place and power — what are 
they but points on the drill of the great machine 
whose power is the people of the world, strug- 
gling in protest against despotism, privilege, au- 
tocracy and the pretence of the few to play 
greedily at the master game. The points break 
off, or are worn off — what difference does it 
make? Joffre, French, Cardona, Neville, As- 
quith, Painleve, Kitchener, Haig — the drill never 
ceases; the power behind it never falters. For 
once in the world the spirit of democracy is or- 
ganized; organized across lines of race, of lan- 
guage, of national boundary! A score of million 
men, in arms, a score of billions of people — 
workers, captains of industry, local leaders, little 
governors and commercial princelets, bosses, 
farmers, bankers, skilled labourers, and men and 
women of fumbling hands and slow brains, teach^ 
ers, preachers, philosophers, poets, thieves, har- 
lots, saints and sinners — all the free people of 



332 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

the world, giving what talents Heaven has be- 
stowed upon them to make the power of this 
great machine that moves so smoothly, so re- 
sistlessly, so beautifully along the white ribbons 
of roads up to the battle. 

When the battle ceases, of course, that organi- 
zation will depart. But always democracy will 
know that it can organize, that it can rise to a 
divine dignity of courage and sacrifice. And 
that knowledge is the great salvage of this war. 
More than written laws, more than justice estab- 
lished, more than wrongs righted in any nation, 
and in all the nations will be the knowledge of 
this latent power of men! 



CHAPTER IX 

IN WHICH WE RETURN TO " THE LAND OF THE 
FREE " 

WE found when we were leaving England 
another of those curious contrasts be- 
tween the nations of the earth that one meets in a 
long journey. Coming into Bordeaux we were 
convoyed for three hours by a ratty little French 
destroyer and a big dirigible French balloon. 
Leaving Liverpool, we lay two nights and a day 
sealed in the harbour, and then sailed out with the 
Arabic, the Mongolian, the Victorian, and two 
freighters, amid a whole flock of cruisers and de- 
stroyers. The protecting fleet stayed with us two 
nights and three days. On the French boat the 
barber practically had no news of sudden deaths 
and hairbreadth escapes which had happened 
while we slept. We sailed into the Gironde 
River peacefully, almost joyously. But we left 
the Mersey with a story that a big fleet of de- 
stroyers hovered at the river's mouth; that the 
Belgic had been beached out there on a shoal by a 

■Z22, 



334 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

"sub," and that we would be lucky if our throats 
were not cut in the water as we tried to swim 
ashore after we had been blown out of our boats. 

The French certainly are more casual than the 
English. But then, the Germans have sunk vir- 
tually no French liners, while the British liner is 
the favourite food of von Tirpetz! They even 
showed us his teeth marks on our American liner, 
the New York. On an earlier trip during the 
summer of 191 7 the boat had been torpedoed 
when Admiral Sims was a passenger, going to 
England. The Admiral was sitting at dinner 
when the explosion occurred and the force of it 
threw him to the high ceiling of the dining saloon ! 
At least that's what they told us. Caution and 
conflicting doubts, " fears within and foes with- 
out," were not so unreasonable as one might 
fancy, coming out of any British port. 

But to Henry and me the greatest contrast 
came, not in the conduct of the ship's officers, as 
compared with the French seamen, but in the 
ship's company, going to war and coming away 
from it. We went with youth; the Espagne was 
crowded with young men going to war, with 
young women going out to serve those who were 
salvaging the waste of war. The boat carried a 
score of lovers — some married, some impromptu, 



"" The Land of the Free " 335 

some incidental and fleeting, but all vastly inter- 
esting. For when the new wine blooms the old 
ferments, and stumbling over the dark decks at 
night on the Espagne, we were forever running 
into youth paired off and gazing at the mystery 
of the ocean and the stars. So the corks were 
always popping in our old hearts; and we en- 
joyed it. But we paced the black night decks of 
the New- York as " one who treads alone a ban- 
quet hall deserted." We were among the younger 
people on the ship. There was no youth to play 
with under thirty! No one touched the piano. 
No one lifted his voice in song. The most devil- 
ish thing going as we sailed was a game of chess ! 
There was a night game of whist or cribbage or 
some other sedentary game, which closed at ten, 
and after that in the library the talk sagged and 
died like a decomposed chord in a Tschaikovsky 
symphony! It was sad! One had to go to the 
smoking room where there was wassail on lemon 
squash and insipid English beer until after mid- 
night. But there the talk was good. Of course 
it sometimes bore a strong smell of man about it, 
but it was virile and wise. A rug dealer from 
Odessa, a dealer in mining machinery from Mos- 
cow, a Chicago college professor returning from 
Petrograd, a cigarette maker from Egypt, a brace 



336 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

of British naval officers going over to return 
with Canadian transports, an American aerial 
engineer, back from an inspection trip to France, 
a great Enghsh actor, who once played Romeo 
with Mary Anderson — to give one an approxi- 
mate of his age — a Red Cross commission from 
Italy, and an Australian premier. The whole 
ship's company was but thirty-four first class and 
of these but six were women. It was no place 
for dashing young blades in their late forties like 
Henry and me. 

As the hour for leaving the ship approached, 
the press of the splendid months behind us drew 
Henry and me together more and more. We 
were hanging over the deck rail looking at a faint 
attempt at a cloudy sunset at the end of our last 
day out. We fell to talking of the love affairs 
on the Espagnc, and perhaps from me came some 
words about the Eager Soul, the Gilded Youth 
and the Young Doctor, Henry looked up dazed 
and anxious. Clearly he did not know what it 
was all about. 

" Who was this Gilded Youth? " asked Henry. 

" He was the dream we dreamed when we were 
boys, Henry. When fate set you out as a book 
agent on the highway and me to kicking a Peer- 
less job press in a dingy printing office. The 



'*' The Land of the Free " 337 

Gilded Youth was all we would fain have been 1 " 

" And the Eager Soul? " quoth he. 

" She, dearly beloved, was the ideal of our boy- 
ish hearts. Did you ever have a red-headed 
sweetheart in those olden golden days, Henry? " 
He shook a sad head in retrospection, " Nor 
did one ever come to me. But most boys want 
one sometime, so I took her off the Red Cross 
Posters and breatlied the breath of life into her. 
And isn't she a peach; and doesn't she kind of 
warm your heart and make up for the hardship 
of your youth? " He smiled assent and asked: 
*' But the young Doctor, Bill, surely he — " 

" He is the American spirit in France, Henry 
— badly scared, very shy at heart, full of hope 
and dying to serve ! " 

" And it never happened — any of it? " asked 
Henry. 

" Yes, oh, yes, Henry. There was the tall boy 
who played Saint Saens on the Espagne, and did 
the funny stunt at the auction; there was the 
night we sat on the food box near the front at 
Douaumont and heard the ambulance boy whist- 
ling the bit from " Thais," far up the hill in the 
misty moonlight ; there was the French soldier by 
the splintered tree in the Forest of Hess; there 
was the head nurse killed by the abri between 



338 Martial Adventures of Henry and Me 

Souilly and Verdun, who waited while her girls 
went in ; there was the poor dying boy in the hos- 
pital for whom you bought the flowers and there 
was the handsome New York woman coming 
over to start her hospital. There was the young 
doctor whom the German officer prisoner tried to 
kill. And there was the picture of the red-headed 
Red Cross nurse, and there were our dreams." 

" And the ending — will you have a happy 
ending? " demanded Henry. 

" Aren't the visions of the young men, and the 
dreams of the old always happy? It is in pass- 
ing through life from one to the other that our 
courage fails and our hearts sadden. And these 
phantoms are of such stuff as dreams are made 
of and they may not falter or grow weary, or 
grow old. Youth always has a happy ending — 
even in death. It is when youth ends in life that 
we may question its happiness." 

/\nd so we left our fancies and walked to the 
big guns far forward and gazed into the sunset, 
where home lay, home, and the things that were 
real, and dear, and worth while. 



THE END 



APPENDIX A 
A Soldier's Song 




Love, though these hands that 
Love, though our dreams shall 



rest in thine so 
have no hope but 




dear, Back in - to 

^this, Love, though our 



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dust, inay crum - ble 
faith !tnu8t he our 



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with "^ the year; 
rar - est bliss; 



Love, though these lips, that 
Love,though the years may 



meet thy lips, so 
bring their death and 



^ 



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true. Soon nlay b^ 
chill; IiOve,thoughoup 




grass ■ that stores the- 
blood must lo^e its. 




morn - ing dew 
pass - ioo, still, 



j n Q 



Love, Know welljthat this 
Still,Love,Knowwell,that this 



fond heart of mine, 
heart is di - vine, 




It shall be al - ways, 
It shall be al-ways 
AAA 



al - ways, al - ways 
al - ways, al - ways 




thinel 
thinel 



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